[time-nuts] AN/URQ13 reference AT cut crystal?

[Hal Murray]

magnus at rubidium.se said:
> A lot of fascinating steps. It would be real fun if one would do a coarse in
> which one would actually build a handful of crystals oneself, to learn the
> basics, and measure them up. It would be a fun summer-coarse to do. 

Something like that isn't totally crazy.  Just mostly.  :)

A friend ran a lab course at the University of Colorado Boulder teaching 
undergraduates how to make silicon chips.  IBM donated most of the gear when 
they decommissioned a 2 inch fab line. Yes, that was many years ago.

One of his great stories was the day a guy wandered into the lab looking for a 
job.  He used to run a fab line for HP and had decided to take a year off to 
go back to school and get a masters.  Needless to say, he was hired.  That was 
a good year.


I assume the number of crystal lines is pretty small so getting a whole setup 
as a donation seems unlikely.  I could imagine being able to "rent" a factory 
for long enough to run a course if a company is going out of business or 
something like that.  It would probably be too expensive but stranger things 
have happened.

If a class like that ever happened, I wonder what fraction of the class would 
be curious time-nuts rather than serious students planning to get a job 
building crystals.

Just a set of lectures on building crystals with good pictures of factory gear 
would be fun.

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jim at luxfamily.com said:
> Getting small feature sizes might be a challenge - when we did it where  i
> used to work, they did photo reduction onto a photoresist covered  substrate.
> I wonder if someone has a laser rig that could programmed to  "draw" the
> pattern on the resist at the right scale. 

Is electron-beam lithography a possibility?  I remember smiling when I read 
that they turned down the power and used it as an electron microscope to find 
markers so they knew where the chip was actually located.  Can you run up the 
power on a normal electron microscope to get a useful write time?


-- 
These are my opinions.  I hate spam.