Some facts of
the Center for Microelectronic Materials
and Structures (µELM)

• The Yale Center for Microelectronic Materials & Structures (µELM) consists of a consortium of faculty members, research staff, graduate students, administrative supporting staff, and visiting scientists from industry and academia with related research interests and shared common facilities. Here are some other facts about µELM.
• The term "µELM" was coined by its founder, Richard C. Barker, Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering, in 1985 (or thereabout) when the Center was first established. The first letter µ represents Micro, and ELM comes from the letters in ELectronic Materials. Since the city of New Haven is also known as the "ELM City", µELM thus has the double meaning as a "Micro City within the ELM City".
• The four founding faculty members of µELM are: Richard C. Barker, T.P. Ma (Prof. of Electrical Engineering), Daniel E. Prober (Prof. of Applied Physics), and Robert G. Wheeler (Prof. Emeritus of Applied Physics), of whom Barker also served as its Founding Director until his retirement in June, 2000.
• Currently, T.P. Ma and Jerry Woodall (Prof. of Electrical Engineering) are Co-Directors of the Center.
• The other faculty members associated with the Center are: Charles Ahn (Asst. Prof. of Applied Phys.), Robert Grober (Asso. Prof. of Applied Phys.), Jung Han (Asso. Prof. of Electrical Eng.), Janet Pan (Asst. Prof. of Electrical Eng.), Daniel Prober (Prof. of Applied Phys.), Mark Reed (Prof. of Electrical Eng.), Robert Schoelkopf (Asst. Prof. of Applied Phys.), and Fredrick Sigworth (Prof. of Physiology).
• The Center’s administrative staff is Mrs. Arlene Ciociola, and its research facility’s support staff is (To Be Filled).
• The laboratory facilities in support of µELM research and education activities include a 2600 sq-ft class 100 Cleanroom that contains equipment for solid state device fabrication, including facilities for photolithography, wet chemical etching, oxidation, diffusion, thermal evaporation, sputtering, reactive ion etching, chemical vapor deposition, and other thin film processes; a MBE laboratory that contains 2 MBE machines for controlled growth of InAs, GaP, and related compound semiconductors, a MOCVD laboratory that houses 2 MOCVD reactors for controlled growth of III-nitride compound semiconductors, a Nanotechnology laboratory that has a E-beam lithography exposure tool for writing images with sub-100 nm features, and an AFM machine for imaging samples with atomic resolution, an Optical Characterization laboratory for measuring optical properties of semiconductors and their device structures, an Electronic Device Characterization laboratory for measuring electronic properties of semiconductor devices, and a Microelectronics Teaching laboratory that is basically a scaled-down version of the research Cleanroom for teaching students the fundamentals as well as practices of solid state device fabrication and characterization.
• The primary shared facility in the Center is the Cleanroom, which was built in 1987 with major funding from the Keck Foundation, Jones Bequest, and Yale University Science Development Fund.
• Several companies donated equipment, and/or contributed other resources to help us establish the Cleanroom. They included IBM, AT&T, Honywell, Nanometrics, Weiss Glass, …. (to be filled in)………
• The sponsors of the various µELM research projects have included NSF, ONR, DARPA, AFOSR, SRC, Hitachi, NEC, Mitsubishi, IBM, Motorola, TI, AMP, ATMI, JPC, Raytheon, NASA, Sematech, and State of Connecticut. (to be added)h
• There is a rigorous qualification procedure that each user must follow to get qualified to use the Cleanroom. Currently there are xx qualified Cleanroom users, and their names are listed under the People section below.
• To a large extent, the daily Cleanroom activities are managed by the Users themselves. There is a Cleanroom Users Committee that works closely with the Cleanroom faculty and research support staff to oversee the daily operations of the facility. In consultation with the faculty and support staff, the Committee enforces the Cleanroom Charter and regulations, administers new users qualification procedure, assign POW duties (see next bullet below), and participates in decisions for equipment acquisition, admission, maintenance, and repair.
• POW stands for "Person of the Week"; i.e., he (she) is the "detail" person who is on duty for a whole week to perform such daily tasks as checking/filling liquid nitrogen, checking/ordering chemicals, gases, cleanroom supplies, checking vacuum pumps, arranging for waste chemical pickup, etc. Every user gets to serve as a POW when his (her) term comes.
• Each major piece of equipment in the Cleanroom has a Master who is its primary user and up-keeper. The Master trains other users who wish to become Qualified Users for that piece of equipment. The Master is also responsible for that equipment’s routine maintenance.h