Graduate student Leidong Mao (left) and research support specialist Chris Tillinghast pose in a "clean room" in Becton Center with one of the donated machines from Intel: a scanning probe microscope that uses a stylus and a laser to produce three-dimensional images of objects up to 200,000 times smaller than a human hair.

Gift of equipment to further
research in engineering

T.P. Ma, the Raymond John Wean Professor and chair of electrical engineering and co-director of the Yale Center for Microelectronics, has accepted a gift of research equipment from Intel Corporation, worth an estimated half-million dollars, to assist engineering in its teaching and research.

The gift of 15 pieces of equipment -- including an atomic force microscope, a reactive ion etcher and a scanning electron microscope -- will be housed in Becton Engineering and Applied Research Center.

The equipment will support three joint Intel-Yale research projects on novel flash memory materials and spintronics. Ma and Charles Ahn, associate professor of applied physics, will lead the research team that includes Yale scientists James Reiner, Sharon Wang, Yanxiang Liu and Agham Posadas, and Intel researchers Steven Soss, Krishnamurthy Murali and Jun-Fei Zheng.

The donation of equipment was initiated by Intel Vice President of Technology Stefan Lai and Intel Fellow Greg Atwood. Lai, who received his Ph.D. from Yale in 1979, had maintained contact with Ma and his dissertation research adviser, Professor Emeritus Richard Barker, founder of the Yale Center for Microelectronics, and was aware of his mentor's interest in future generations of semiconductor devices.

Zheng, researcher-in-residence from Intel, is working with Ma to oversee the shipment of the equipment to Yale. Research support specialist Christopher Tillinghast in Yale's Faculty of Engineering will manage installation and maintenance of the equipment.