Jim - Re:"...figured you for an EE rather than materials science"
An Electrical Engineering education is certainly required to design integrated circuits.
What is not commonly recognized, outside the semiconductor industry, is that Materials Science, Chemical Engineering and Physics are the disciplines that best prepare someone for a wafer fabrication/technology development background to BUILD the integrated circuits.
IC's are made up of silicon (the substrate), oxides (both thermally grown and deposited), polysilicon, tungsten, and aluminum alloys among many others. All these are specialized materials and the deposition techniques used to make/deposit them all fall into the general area of materials processing. These include oxidation, CVD (Chemical Vapor Deposition), Sputtering, Ion Implantation, Chemical-Mechanical-Planarization (CMP), etc.
If you ever get an opportunity - get a tour through a modern semiconductor wafer fab. It is wild - all these exotic machines with robotic handling. $1.5 Billion buys some pretty neat "machinery".
Speaking of Physics - my best friend, and one of the smartest men I know, is a Physicist. (Albert Kovalyov may be a Physicist and smart but this is not the person I am referring to!)
Despite the differences in backgrounds that we have, we both sort of ended up doing the same thing - Investments.
It's funny - Investments are about as predictable as fabricating integrated circuits!
Paul |
