I recently visited the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and gave a presentation. It was a fun experience, let me describe it...
I'll start off by giving you some background on the TUM. According to Wikipedia, "TUM has a sound international reputation and was ranked 2nd in Germany in 2010 by the Academic Ranking of World Universities, was ranked 1st in Germany in Engineering & Technology by the QS World University Rankings, and was ranked 4th in Germany by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings." The list of Nobel Prize winners affiliated with the university catches one's attention. It includes many familiar names such as Thomas Mann (the writer), Rudolf Mossbauer (of the Mossbauer effect), Ernst Ruska (who designed the first electron microscope) and Klaus von Klitzing (who came up with the Quantum hall effect). I once interacted with Klaus von Klitzing when he visited Georgia Tech to give a talk, and was much impressed by him. TUM is famous for a few "non-intellectual things" as well... If you like the famous Gordon Biersch brand of beer, say thanks to TUM next time you have it. Dan Gordon, the founder of Gordon Biersch, studied at TUM's brewing school, which is known to be the #1 brewing school in the world. He formed Gordon Biersch to manufacture the kind of beer he learned to make at the TUM. If you like garlic fries, say thanks to TUM again. Dan Gordon invented garlic fries when he studied at the TUM (see below picture).
My tour of the TUM began with a visit to the Walter Schottky Institute. The institute was funded in 1986 and was a joint initiative of TUM, Siemens and the Bavarian ministry... it was named after Walter Schottky since it was his 100th birth anniversary that year, and also because he was one of Siemens' most famous alumni and the institute was supposed to carry out the kind of research he did, i.e. merge basic physics with development of novel devices. They have a nice modern clean-room at the location which includes epi tools, e-beam lithography tools and a whole bunch of other tools as well. One thing which struck me was the amount of basic research being done at the Walter Schottky institute and the Electrical Engineering Department of TUM in general. In most universities in the US today, Electrical Engineering folks focus on things that are 5 years out, and don't really work on things with a 15 year scope. Basic research is high-risk, but can sometimes produce real breakthroughs, such as the ones that won TUM it's 14 Nobel Prizes.
My host, Prof. Franz Kreupl, then took me to his office in the Electrical Engineering department, which is located in downtown Munich. Franz joined TUM just a month back, and is setting up a research group on graphene, nanotubes and nanowires. For those not familiar with Franz, he did some pioneering work on carbon nanotubes and graphene when he was at Infineon Corporate Research in the late 1990s-early 2000s. His list of achievements is incredible: he and his team demonstrated the first integrated vias made with carbon nanotubes in 2001, demonstrated the first precise localized growth of single nanotubes in 2002, made the first nanotube power transistor in 2003, developed the shortest nanotube transistor in 2004, and invented the first application of graphene layers in dynamic RAMs (DRAMs) in 2005. We have seen commercial products with several of these technologies eg. graphene layers in DRAMs and nanotube power transistors. Carbon nanotube vias are a hot research topic as well. Franz continued his good work at SanDisk and did some neat stuff there... I was lucky enough to work closely with Franz when he was at SanDisk, and learned a lot from him.
We then visited TUM's second cleanroom at the Electrical Engineering building. The clean-room has most, if not all, of the equipment you need for good semiconductor research, eg. deposition, etch, patterning and metrology tools, besides device characterization equipment and a whole bunch of other stuff. I met several of the faculty and students there during my visit, and in fact, found that some of them had conducted research on Monolithic 3D a few years back. If you look at the picture below, you'll see details of a TUM paper on monolithic 3D SRAMs.
Following this, I gave my talk on monolithic 3D integrated circuits... the students, professors and industry folks who attended asked good questions, and even laughed at my not-so-good attempts at humor! :-) You can find the slides of my talk here. Please feel free to let me know if you have any questions... I can be reached at [email protected].
Goodbye for now, or as the Germans say, Auf Weidersehen!
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