Dear all, In an effort to improve fabrication quality at Birck, we are starting a new program focused on process characterization, monitoring, and control. Essentially, we would like our engineering staff to help you achieve consistent and repeatable results by regularly running and characterizing your critical fabrication processes in the cleanroom. This could have multiple benefits: 1. Improved quality control and repeatability 2. Provides early warning for process and equipment problems 3. Effectively creating and maintaining process database and lab memory 4. Active engagement of engineering staff into research 5. Lowering fabrication cost and time for everyone This effort will be successful only with active participation of faculty and their research group. As a first step, we would like to invite each group to document the steps for a couple of critical processes they follow on a regular basis. For example, it could be a lithography process (document PR, recipes, measurement method), or an oxide deposition process (document sample preparation, deposition recipe, measurement method). In the beginning students/postdocs will be training engineering staff to run these processes. In the long run the staff members will run these on a regular basis and maintain a database. This will be a dynamic program with new processes being added and obsolete ones being retired on a regular basis. Priority will be given to processes that benefit multiple groups. Please send these processes to Ron and I by March 24, 2017 in a ppt format. After this, we will have a meeting to group these and discuss a plan to get started. We would very much welcome any thoughts and ideas you have on how to make this successful and improve everyone's fabrication results at Birck. Best, Dimitri ________________________________________________________________________________ Dimitrios Peroulis Professor, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering Deputy Director, Birck Nanotechnology Center Purdue University 1205 West State Street West Lafayette, IN 47907-2057 tel: (765) 494-3491 email: dperouli@purdue.edu<mailto:dperouli@purdue.edu> http://sites.google.com/site/peroulisteam/ ________________________________________________________________________________