Recently, I received a call from a researcher at UNC asking if we could process some wafers with a particular Low Stress Nitride film. She only needed a few wafers done, which makes it really expensive on a per-wafer cost basis due to the large 50 wafer batch size for this type of deposition. In other words, it costs the same to process 2 wafers as it does for 50.

Anyway, as I was telling her this I recalled doing something similar for Jungsang Kim at Duke about a month earlier. He also only needed maybe a dozen wafers but ended up doing 25 since the cost was essentially the same for processing. The lightbulb went off and I told the UNC gal that she could probably finagle a few off Duke for a fraction of our cost and put her in touch with Jungsang, who presumably hooked her up.

This is the kind of result we strive for, bringing bitter rivals together to work for the greater good! OK, of course I'm overstating it with tongue in cheek, but if creating this little local network results in lower expenses for your program, then I think we've done our job?

What other collaborations can you envision?

 

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