NSF Microfabrication Workshops

This is a report on the NSF (National Science Foundation) Microfabrication Laboratory Workshops. This series of workshops was sponsored by the National Science Foundation and held at San Jose State University. The theme of the workshops is that microfabrication experiments can be included in undergraduate laboratory curriculum, even with a very limited budget. Several significant experiments were developed during the workshops. The most popular is a simple photolithography "artwork" exercise that demonstrates the techniques for fabrication of integrated circuits; the investment for this exercise is about the same as for a photography dark room. 165 undergraduate faculty attended the workshops. 142, or 86%, have implemented workshop curriculum improvements at their home universities. About 5000 undergraduate students have performed workshop related experiments; the acceleration rate is about one thousand students per year per year. A surprise finding of the workshops was the large number of existing underutilized integrated circuit labs at universities.