Freelance
News Service
Ceramic Engineering: from Insulator to
Conductor
By William Cracraft
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Some of the hottest jobs outside of computer engineering are in materials engineering, including work with ceramics. Ceramics are used throughout computer chipmaking, but as development reveals more characteristics, the spectrum of uses grows.
"Ceramics is one of the many exciting areas in a materials that is happening right now," said Guna Sulvedarey, associate dean at San Jose State University. "There are things that are here and there are things that are coming."
Currently, integrated circuits couldn’t be produced without ceramics, he said. "The old concept was that ceramic was the insulator, now we have ceramics that are superconductors.
"Closer to home, if you buy a portable computer, your hard disk drive is probably glass, which is a ceramic. The push is to go to ceramic even for desk tops. As you go to higher speeds, the ridgitity is not there for metals," said Sulvedarey. Ceramic uses are diversifying. Concepts for ceramics range from kitchen knives to magnetic levitation trains. Why ceramic instead of steel?
"A ceramic kitchen knife doesn’t need to be sharpened for a very long time," Sulvedarey said. One revolutionary product could be a ceramic-lined engine and prototypes have already been tested. An engine with ceramic liners inside will function without a radiator because it needs no water cooling, and fuel efficiency is 30-40 percent higher than a regular automobile.
"Ceramics is already playing a critical role and I have no doubt it will play a greater role as these industrial products start coming on line. There is actually a severe shortage of material engineers to begin with, including ceramics," Sulvedarey said.
For those interested materials sciences, the Bay Area is rife with opportunity. Along with SJSU, Stanford and Berkeley offer materials science degrees. There are universities that offer degrees in ceramic engineering and there are schools that offer a materials and science engineering degree but offer a strong ceramics presence, said Sulvedarey.
The scientific breakthrough is already there, we need to wait for the engineering development, he said. Some of those developments are taking place in Santa Clara at National Semiconductor, a chip maker. Right now, the ceramics used in chips as gates controlling the flow of electrons are no thicker than 10 rows of atoms or less, said Mike Thomas, research engineering manager for National Semiconductor.
"The thinner the ceramic, the faster the electrons can travel, and that’s why better ceramics make such a big difference," said Thomas, who is in the interconnect research department. "We have large numbers of engineers working on how to generate a process that involves integrating metals, semiconductors and ceramic films," said Thomas.
"We have to put all of these together. We use the ceramic films to generate isolation between electrical signals, we use it to form capacitors on the chip and to passivate the chip from the external world so it doesn’t deteriorate over time. "We’re getting to the point that we’re almost to atomic size dimensions in the next couple of years,Thomas said.
All the engineers who are material scientists are working on the process to build all of these devices that contribute to the information age. Therefore we have to have material scientist with completely different skill sets than they had in the past.
"You look for all kinds of people with materials experience," said Thomas, "because they have to know when they’re processing these wafers how to generate or pattern the materials by etching them. They have to know how to apply and remove other types of materials on top of the ceramics and delineate them. This is definitely engineering level work, not technician."
In development research the nature of the beast demands more than technical know-how. You want people who are not only strong in the materials, but who also have good communication skills, said Thomas. They have to be able to write and sell their ideas, as well as handle the materials. "We would like to have more people savvy in the materials area, that’s for sure," said Thomas. "We have to have hundreds easily working on material engineering. We’re hunting for people right now, every day."