UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Penn State alumnus Richard A. Gottscho, executive vice president and strategic adviser to the chief executive officer of innovation ecosystem at Lam Research, will present the Müller Lecture on semiconductors at 5 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 19, in Robb Hall of the Hintz Family Alumni Center at Penn State University Park. The talk, titled “Human-Machine Collaboration in Semiconductor Process Development,” is free and open to the public, with appetizers and conversation to follow from 6 to 7 p.m.
Gottscho’s lecture will describe his work on semiconductor research at Lam Research, a topic in which he has more than 40 years of experience. Previously at Lam, he was the executive vice president and chief technology officer.
After Gottscho earned his bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Penn State in 1974, he obtained his doctorate in physical chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He then was a member of Bell Laboratories, where he was the head of the electronics packaging department.
Recognized as an all-star of the semiconductor industry by VLSresearch in 2020, Gottscho also is a fellow of the American Physical Society and American Vacuum Society. In 2016, he was inducted into the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. He also has been honored with AVS’s Peter Mark Memorial Award, the Plasma Science and Technology Division Prize, and the Dry Process Symposium Nishizawa Award.
Gottscho recently was announced as a member of Penn State’s Campaign Leadership Council, a group of alumni volunteers who have demonstrated their depth of generosity and volunteer spirit in giving back to the University. He also is one of Penn State's 12 Alumni Fellows for 2024.
Lecture abstract
Semiconductors are pervasive in our society and underly all technological capabilities, solutions and threats. The technology continues to evolve at a rapid pace, and the corresponding business opportunities continue to grow substantially. Although chips have been designed by computers for decades, ironically the processes used to manufacture those chips have eluded design based on physics or data. While chips can design chips, chips are not yet able to design the processes by which those chips are made. Humans are still central to the endeavor. Virtually all processes used to manufacture chips have been developed, not designed, by trial and error — a costly endeavor using highly trained and experienced process engineers searching for a combination of tool parameters that produce an acceptable result on the device, out of more than 100 trillion possibilities! Because the solution space dimensionality is so large, and because process development is time consuming and costly, machine learning approaches have been hampered by too little data. Physics-based approaches suffer from large numbers of unknown parameters and complex equations that require excessive computational time to solve.
This talk will begin with a brief review of how chips are made, how pervasive chip technology has become in our society, and what is projected for future chip technology and business. Gottscho will then delve into a study that showed a human-first, computer-last approach could reach process engineering targets dramatically faster and at substantially lower cost compared to today's empirical approach. A virtual plasma-etching environment was created to enable comparison of humans to machines and algorithms to algorithms. The use of synthetic data from a virtual environment, even though it is not precisely predictive, provided a path to leverage the strengths of human experts and their domain knowledge as well as the strengths of machine learning to deal with “little data” and accelerate the pace of innovation in semiconductor process engineering.
About the lectureship
The Erin W. Müller Memorial Lectureship was established in 1978 for in honor of the late Erwin Müller, to support lectures in surface and solid-state physics. From 1962 to 1977, Müller was the Evan Pugh Professor of Physics at Penn State, where he co-invented the atom-probe field ion microscope in 1967.