Brad Ferguson visits Austin and the lab!

Brad visited Buddie and the lab on Wednesday evening May 27th and it was really great visiting with Brad!  He toured all of our labs and spent a little bit of time looking at the machine that he did much of his dissertation work on and then Buddie and Brad had dinner together.  Brad began working at Cypress Semiconductor in Minneapolis in 1998 immediately after finishing his Ph.D. and he still works for Cypress!  Brad and Cypress are doing really well and he was in Austin working on a new facility that Cypress has acquired. 

July, 2015

Yong-Mao Lin sends photo's and tells us how things are going!

Yong-Mao sent us an update on how things are going (along with a few photographs now posted in the Photo's section of the web-site under 2015) and Buddie is finally getting this information up onto our site.  Yong-Mao reminds us that he is currently working as a process development engineer at Intel.  Thus far he has 1.5 years of experience on the patterning process for semiconductor manufacturing with 22nm and 14nm technology. His expertised is in the plasma dry etch process for Intel's tri-gate transistor.  He tells us that he and his family are doing great and really enjoying the Portland area.  Keep up the good work Yong-Mao!

June, 2015

Son Hoang welcomes daughter Vivian into the world!

Son Hoang and his wife welcomed their daughter Vivian into the world recently!  Congratulations Son!!

March, 2015

Chris Seets leading Seagate's effort in advanced technology for disk drives!

Chris writes and says he is currently Senior Director of Engineering and leading their wafer process development effort on what they hope will be the next generation of disc drives. They are using a technology called HAMR (Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording) which involves adding a laser to the recording head to help write the media and also using semiconductor techniques (e.g., lithography, depositions, etches, etc.) to construct the reader and writer in addition to the laser light path (one wafer produces about 100,000 recording heads and takes several months to make with over 1300 different processing steps). The heat from the laser defines the track width and lowers the coercivity of the magnetic media and which can then be swept with a magnetic field over the heated spot to orient the direction (up or down which corresponds to a 1 or 0). This process is extremely challenging to implement, but hopefully we will all pick up a disk drive in about the 2018 to 2020 time frame that uses this technology. Congratulations on all of your accomplishments with this new technology Chris!!

October, 2014

Ming Pan accepts position with BASF in Georgia!

Ming Pan has accepted a position as a process development engineer/scientist with BASF in Georgia. Ming's primary duties will involve research and development related to catalyst scale-up and manufacturing and he says that he will work closely with research, manufacturing, and commercial groups. Congratulations Ming!!

October, 2014

Doug Safarik is promoted!

Doug Safarik received a well-deserved promotion at Los Alamos National Laboratory!

October, 2014

Randall Meyer moves to ExxonMobil Research!

Randall resigned his position as an Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago in August 2014 and joined the ExxonMobil Corporate Research Labs in Annendale, New Jersey. He, Iliyana, Alex, and Andrei are all doing very well!

October, 2014

Paul Tanaka visits the lab in September 2014!

Paul was in Austin for a meeting in early September and he and Buddie had lunch together and a great time talking about the world energy situation and old times!

October, 2014

Pete Nolan visits us!

Pete Nolan was in Austin for business in December 2013 and dropped by for a visit. We had a great time talking and showing Pete the labs!

October, 2014

Paul and Chia Abel have a daughter!

Chia and Paul Abel celebrate the birth of their daughter Victoria this month! Congratulations!!

October, 2014