UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — On Sept. 19, Richard Gottscho, Penn State alumnus, executive vice president and strategic adviser to the chief executive officer of innovation ecosystem at Lam Research, and 2024 Alumni Fellow Award recipient, presented the Erwin W. Müller Memorial Lecture, where he discussed his work with semiconductors.
 
“Behind the equipment is a cadre of very talented and experienced engineers, people, that are not only designing the equipment but designing the recipes that go into the equipment,” Gottscho said.
 
The Erwin W. Müller Memorial Lecture honors Erwin Wilhelm Müller, a German physicist who invented the field emission electron microscope, the field ion microscope, and the atom-probe field ion microscope and served on the faculty of Penn State’s Department of Physics from 1952 to 1976.
 
In Gottscho’s presentation, "Human-Machine Collaboration in Semiconductor Process Development," he spoke about his experience coupling machine learning with human experience to create cheaper and faster results when fine tuning the parameters for semiconductor fabrication.
 
During the lecture, Gottscho asked: “Why can’t I sit down at a computer and design this process?”
 
To which he responded, “To develop one process for the next generation of 3D data, it takes tens of engineers — between the algorithm engineers and the customer engineers — one year before it can be put into production, and it is all trial and error.”