Last spring Candra Smith was minding her own business, studying chemistry at the college she attends in Mississippi and thinking about cheerleading, which she enjoys, dancing, which she loves, and her boyfriend, whom she loves even more.
She was not thinking about photolithography, silicon wafers, etch masks, spinners, convection ovens, nanostructures, optics and how a major U.S. corporation might take what she was doing this summer and make a new product out of it.
But since she got to Cornell in June, they're just about all she thinks about.
"I never even heard of photolithography before coming here," Smith said, taking a break from her duties in the Cornell Nanofabrication Facility (CNF). We just don't have any of that." No e-mail or Internet access, either, at her small, liberal arts college.
A junior chemistry major at Tougaloo College near Jackson, Miss., Smith who has never traveled this far north is one of 12 undergraduate students taking part in this year's Research Experience for Undergraduates at the world of the ultrasmall in the nanofabrication laboratory. The 10-week program gives stu dents an introduction to microstructures science, each student working on a sepa rate research project under the direction of a Cornell faculty or staff member.
In Smith's case, she is helping build arrays of tiny lenses for Corning Inc., which may use them to improve LCD television screens. The problem: making a photoresist on a silicon wafer hard enough to withstand an extreme physical environment without ruining the optics. She is working with Garry J. Bordonaro, a photolithographic process engineer at the CNF, and Nicholas Borrelli, a research fellow at Corning.
The solution: an old Technics turntable, with a tone arm that can be calibrated. Using different-sized pencils instead of a needle attached to the arm, Smith measures how much pressure it takes to etch a mark in the wafer.
The work required some innovative thinking, Bordonaro said. "This is an area no one's looked at. It's completely uncharted waters, so we had to devise a way to measure the hardness. There is no instrument for it."
"I like this program because I've never been exposed to anything like this. I'll take this back to my college and let them know what it's all about, too," Smith said. "It's tedious, but it's fun. It's not like sitting in class all day. And you get to talk to a lot of different people with different problems in their research. They're interesting."
Jeffrey Yap, from Los Gatos, Calif., also wanted to get his feet wet in research. The Cornell junior, majoring in materials science and engineering, is working under Jack Blakely, professor of materials science, and is helping fabricate arrays of tips that can be used to reduce the amount of pressure needed to test a computer chip. The less pressure, the smaller the chip.
"We try to get little dots of photoresist, about 4 to 8 microns across, on a silicon wafer," Yap said. "We can etch into the wafer selectively."
He said the summer research experience is extremely helpful. "I really get a feel for doing serious research. This is something new. It's really interesting for me to dis cover something; even if it's not exactly as planned, this thing does something."
The students, who are here June 3 through Aug. 9, spent the first couple of weeks in class, taking "Nanocourses," introductions to the equipment and facilities, such as lithography and thin film technology. The students have to prepare a technical final report, an abstract for general publication and an oral report for a research forum.
The program is supported by the National Science Foundation, the CNF, Corn ing Inc., Intel Inc., Xerox Corp., DuPont and Eastman Kodak.