Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Ten to four

Ten to four am that is. I now sit infront of a computer inside a clean room (an envrionment which contains less dust particles than usual) cleaning a chromium mask used for optical lithography. In simple terms, I'm just washing a metal mask which is used to block light from hitting some parts of a film... made of a polymer that is used to make an image on silicon. Some parts of the silicon are exposed and some parts are not and from there, people like me in the nanotech world are free to etch holes or deposit materials on top of the silicon to make devices. Nanotech is not really that bad... we just make really small "pictures" of things on silicon that hopefully do useful things.

Anyways, there is a reason why I am not sleeping regular hours tonight (and possibly for the next 2 weeks) and that reason is to make it to France sometime in the spring to hit the Transducers conference... that is, if I can get some publishable results.

The one nice thing about working late at night is that all the machines here are available for use and I don't have other pesky people getting in the way. It is also a double edged sword in the sense I can't ask questions when I don't know when something goes wrong. Well, we'll see how things go.

Significant updates to come later while I'm working on long and boring processing steps...

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