In a tiny laboratory deep within Rochester Institute of Technology's campus, professors pair with graduate students and devise ways to make better semiconductors.

Semiconductors are the special chips found inside your computer devices. They power the brain of your phone, tablet, laptop or desktop computer. Large corporations like IBM, Apple and Intel use semiconductors today, but they're always looking for a new or more efficient model.

And that's where research universities like RIT and its semiconductor lab steps in.

Microelectronics professor Karl Hirschman said there are several lengthy steps (called photolithography) involved in making a perfect and usable semiconductor. But RIT recently purchased a new laser that shortcuts a few of those steps.

"It's very nice for research and development," said Christopher O'Connell, a RIT graduate student in microelectronics. "It works in an hour as opposed to eight."

RIT's new Heidelberg DWL66+ is a $500,000 laser that the university paid $150,000 for and the National Science Foundation chipped in the rest. RIT isn't the only university with this device. Places like the University of California, Berkeley and Cornell University already use this laser.

Hirschman said RIT already has a machine for making semiconductors, but the Heidelberg DWL66+ will help researchers quickly tinker with the photolithography process.

Heidelberg officials from Germany came to Rochester and installed the laser in January. Since then, a handful of RIT technicians have been ironing out the laser's kinks. For now, the laser will be used among five RIT professors and their graduate students. But eventually, O'Connell said he will help train more students to use the laser.

In the near future, Hirschman said professors will figure out how to work the new laser into curriculum in the microelectronic engineering department.

For RIT, having a new laser on campus isn't about researchers having a shiny new toy. It means the university is joining the race to figure out an important challenge facing consumer electronics: how to make them faster and better.

Aside from its academic uses, Hirschman said the new laser will help RIT come up with new chemical combinations for making semiconductors.

For example, most semiconductors are made from thin sheets of silicon, or silicon wafers. However, silicon as a chemical has its limitations. And because of those limitations, Hirschman said scientists are experimenting with making semiconductors with other raw materials like silicon germanium, gallium arsenide or indium gallium arsenide.

The people who make your laptops and cellphones aren't waiting for academia to figure it out. Companies large and small are already thinking of new ways to make computer chips. IBM is experimenting with carbon nanotubes while Silicon Valley startup Efficient Power Conversion is using gallium nitride.

Finding a new way to make semiconductors, particularly ones that last longer, is attractive to electronics companies and fascinating to lithography researchers across New York.

Garry Bordonaro, a microlithographic engineer at Cornell, said the Ithaca school also has a DWL66+. Bordonaro said there are other, more expensive lasers that do the same type of work, but the DWL66+ "meets most of the requirements of research and development in terms of resolution."

"It also has additional capabilities unusual for tools in its price range, such as optical alignment of patterns already on the target material and a user-friendly interface," he said.

By: DocMemory
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