Sophisticated microfabrication equipment donated to UBC by TRIUMF will boost
the high-tech manufacturing industry in B.C., says Tom Tiedje, director of UBC’s
Advanced Materials and Process Engineering Laboratory (AMPEL).
The equipment, worth about $1 million, will be used at UBC to make micro-electronic
and optical devices such as semiconductor lasers and high speed transistors.
“In B.C. we have a strong software industry and a pretty good systems industry.
But people are buying components from other places and then putting systems
together here,” Tiedje said. “There’s little manufacturing capability in B.C.
for these components, with most of the manufacturing done in the U.S. or the
Far East.”
Clean rooms in AMPEL were an important factor in TRIUMF’s decision to donate
the equipment, Tiedje says. AMPEL provides an ideal environment for the operation
of the sensitive equipment which uses a photolithographic process to imprint
patterns — visible only through a microscope — on silicon or compound semiconductor
wafers.
TRIUMF staff will continue to have access to the equipment which will be used
primarily by graduate students in the departments of Electrical and Computer
Engineering, Physics and Astronomy, and Chemistry. Graduate students will be
trained to use the equipment by a research engineer and then carry out their
processing work themselves. The knowledge they gain is what will help the manufacturing
industry, Tiedje says.
“If you want to start a business manufacturing integrated circuits or electronic
components, the main difficulty is finding the knowledge and skilled personnel
to do it. These people don’t develop in a vacuum. People require training, and
training requires facilities like this,” he says.
Since microfabrication equipment involves a variety of expensive pieces of
processing equipment, multiple users are required to justify the capital and
operating costs. The AMPEL facility makes this possible by bringing together
people from different disciplines with a common interest in microfabrication,
Tiedje says.
“The TRIUMF donation is extremely important because it provides us with a
complete working facility that would otherwise have taken us many years to put
together from several funding sources.”
