WIR – War of the worlds
I’ve decided that I’m going to introduce a new slot kinda thing… What I’m Reading. Here I’m going to write some nice short reviews of what I’m currently reading.
This one is going to be about war of the worlds…
It’s probably worth me mentioning at this juncture that I’m not actually reading this current, what I am reading is a tale of two cites, and science of the discworld 2… Reviews of them might follow but I’ve been reading a tale of two cites for a few months now, there just isn’t the time I’d like.
When I did find the time to read it was whilst sat in a clean room. Some of you (I hope) will be thinking at this point “but you’re not allowed paper in clean rooms” and that’s very true, which is why I read it as an ebook. I have to say that I’m not a very big fan of ebooks most of my reading had been on a 3.7″ screen touch screen phone and I just don’t really like the feel of it, but it does mean that wherever I go I do have my book with me.
Because science is what I do, I’ll give a brief description of one of the processes I do in the cleanroom and why reading is often a good idea. The process is a photo-lithography one. You start with your substrate, in this case it’s a type III-V semiconductor. If the process is to work well you need to clean it, my normal process for this is as follows. Use acetone and a bit of cotton wool (bad as it’s dusty so be careful!), and scrub the surface. Use some more acetone in a clean dish, touch the edge of some lens cleaning tissue into the acetone and lay it onto the edge of the substrate, slowly dragging to to the side… Repeat with IPA. Not much time for reading yet, I know.
The next step is to spin down some photo resist. Photo resist is a chemical (normal some polymer) that when it’s exposed to light changes so that it dissolves, or doesn’t dissolve depending on the exact resist used. I want a nice thin layer of this stuff, so there’s a device we use that sucks substrates down and spins them very fast. If you then drop a small amount of the resit dissolved in some solvent it spreads out, giving you a very uniform thin layer. This needs to be left to dry which takes about 10mins. And then it needs to be left to cool down… Another 5 mins… It takes around 8mins to leave and come back into the clean room and my office is a couple of mins walk away, so there’s really no way I can leave the clean room in this time.
Next is the exposure, I shine very bright light at small areas of the sample activating the resist. That involves about 2mins of waiting for the exposure. Because I want the inverse of my exposed structure, the next step is another heating cooling round that takes around 20 mins, followed by a 5 min exposure.
These now need to be placed in another solvent to remove the areas of the resist that are not required, this is done in rounds of 3mins rinsing drying and checking between each round. So even if I have several samples on the go at once (up to 20), there’s lots of time when I can read a page or two.
Now, back to the book. I’d heard lots about it, but I’ve never read it. I’ve only ever seen a few mins of the very old film and none of the more recent one. It was a good read, an enjoyable story with a likeable main character. Now it was a while ago I read it so this actual reviewesk section of my post will seem a little underpar, sorry about that.
But then it ended. There is nothing that leads up to the end, it just ends. I was incredibly disappointed, it had been really enjoyable right up until that point. I would like to think that this is at least on purpose, abandoning the normal build up to a crescendo set piece at the end and just have the book end… But I did not enjoy it at all, such a shame :’(
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