One man's strange journey from particles to patents

摘要

I was actually looking for a job in the forest service when I was offered a job at Intel in the late 1970s. The exciting new world of wafers and ICs was just too hard to pass up, and besides, I thought I could always go back to a comfy job with Smokey the Bear later. Wrong. During my formative years, these things called particles or defects attracted my attention, although they seemed difficult to pin down and there wasn't much to read up on to understand their sources, behaviors, and impacts. I can still see in my mind diffusion furnace sleds and hooks, and process tubes that had ruts ground into them from pulling wafers in sleds out with a glass rod formed in the shape of a hook. Those were the glory days of reducing defects by using your eyes and brainpower to simply point your finger and say, "A-ha, there is the problem!"