Nanoscale technology is quickly becoming the most fantasized answer to the future in the engineering world. The University of Alberta’s mineral engineering researchers might have just saved the manufacturing processes of electronics industries some money. The researchers have been working with ‘Atomic layer deposition’ (ALD) which sees slim films covered in molecule materials like “zinc, silicon and nitrogen” which would assist with the manufacturing of electronic chips and how efficiently they are manufactured.
The Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering in the university are confident the new films they have developed will assist computers and electronic devices by altering the atomic layer deposition.
Ken Cadien, a materials engineering professor put the discovery into context, saying that zinc or silicon are a prerequisite to making thin film devices but are heavily overpriced. “Some of these are big molecules and in semiconductor manufacturing if you’re a company producing 10,000 12-inch wafers a week — small amounts of something add up to big amounts of something.”
Triratna Muneshwar, a graduate with his doctorate from the University of Alberta told Phys.org, “My interest in this came about in conversation with Dr. Cadien and one of his colleagues who said that precursor costs are a challenge…There are more than 1,000 atomic layer deposition systems in the world but there’s only a small handful of people asking why and how these things work, who are trying new things. When you’re doing that, you can come up with breakthroughs like this.”
The two confirm that since they have published their findings, leading players in the electronic manufacturing industry have purchased the journal to learn from the work they are doing.
Muneshwar published his findings in the Journal of Applied Physics.