David E. Aspnes
| David E. Aspnes | |
|---|---|
| Born |
1 May 1939 Madison, WI, United States |
| Fields | Condensed matter physics; surface physics; optics: expt. and theor. |
| Institutions | North Carolina State University |
| Alma mater |
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign University of Wisconsin–Madison |
David Erik Aspnes (born 1 May 1939 in Madison, Wisconsin) is an American physicist and a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1998). Aspnes developed fundamental theories of the linear and nonlinear optical properties of materials and thin films, and the technology of spectroscopic ellipsometry (SE). SE is a metrology that is indispensable in the manufacture of integrated circuits.
Aspnes grew up on a dairy farm in the Madison area, attending a one-room country school. Aspnes earned BS (1960) and MS (1961) degrees in Electrical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Having found that a good living could be made by doing work that wasn’t dirty and dangerous, he continued his education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he received a Ph.D. degree in Physics with a mathematics minor in 1965. Aspnes spent a postdoctoral year at UIUC, where he wrote several seminal papers on the effect of electric fields on the optical properties of materials, and a second year at Brown University, where he began experimental work in the same field. In 1967 he joined the research area of Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, as a Member of the Technical Staff.
At Bell Laboratories Aspnes pursued his interest in the optical properties of materials and thin films, and their use not only to characterize the type of material but also its nanostructure. Again combining theory and experiment, he developed SE as the premier method of obtaining this information. The technology that he developed, involving both massive data acquisition and methods of analysis, became a foundation of integrated-circuit (IC) technology, where SE is essential for ensuring that process parameters are under control and that results are within specification. Of the hundreds of processing steps used to make modern ICs, of the order of 100 of these are assessed by SE. While ICs are the result of progress in a number of areas, it is no exaggeration to say that current capabilities in electronics, computing, communications, and data storage would not be possible without the information provided by SE. The work also created a new field: this year (2013) the 6th International Conference on Spectroscopic Ellipsometry will be held in Kyoto, where many papers are reporting applications of SE to biology and medicine.
...
Wikipedia