Fall 2006
In This Issue:
Focus On Optical Materials
The EOC: A Seed Crystal for Electro-Optic Growth in Pennsylvania
In the coal and iron country of western Pennsylvania thirty miles north of Pittsburgh, near the banks of the Allegheny River, at least 115 Penn State employees are at work developing materials, processes, and programs in optical and electronics technologies at the Penn State Electro-Optics Center. Working with faculty and students from the main campus at University Park, and collaborating with faculty and student researchers at nearby Carnegie Mellon and Penn State's New Kensington campus, the EOC is the center of a developing electro-optics industry hub in western Pennsylvania.
The EOC is made up of two buildings at different locations, an electro-optics materials center in Freeport, and a new research and administrative center in the Northpointe Industrial Park about four miles north, just across the river from Kittanning, a sleepy city of 4,000 that would benefit greatly from the rise of new industry in the region.
EOC attracts new industry
Along with its own rapid growth, which has seen the center double in size over the last three years, the EOC has begun to attract small electro-optics companies to the area. To date, six new companies or divisions of larger companies with electro-optics expertise have located in the area. One of these companies is RAPT Industries, a 2001 start-up based in Livermore, California, whose high-speed process for etching and polishing optical and semiconductor materials was developed at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. In 2004, RAPT moved into the new multi-tenant Technology Center at Northpointe.
RAPT's co-founder Dr. Peter Fiske explained the company's decision to expand into western Pennsylvania: “We originally connected with the staff of the EOC through equipment manufacturer Extrude Hone in Irwin, PA. We visited the Electro-Optics Center and were impressed with their facility and their approach. They had lots of resources and great people.”
“We're neighbors now, and we send staff over to borrow their equipment,” Fiske continued. “They have great microscopes for characterization. We are from the Bay Area and have a lot of those tools here, plus the resources of great universities like UC Berkeley and Stanford where a lot of our staff are from. We wouldn't be in Pennsylvania if we didn't have access to those kinds of tools. Electro-optics is technologically intense, and many universities don't have all the equipment we needed. The EOC does and they make it easy to work with them. Western Pennsylvania is very strong in its number of research universities and in the strong pool of manufacturing expertise. This part of PA is growing in competitiveness in high tech manufacturing, and it is those kinds of world class research institutes and manufacturing experience that will keep U.S. high tech industries viable in a very competitive world market.”
Dan Perez, graduate student in the Redwing Group, works with the EOC's $1.5M dual chamber molecular beam epitaxy system.
The EOC was established in 1999 under the Office of Naval Research's ManTec (manufacturing technology) program as a center of excellence to reduce the Navy's cost of electrooptic components and systems through the development of improved manufacturing technology. Originally a component of the Penn State Applied Research Lab, the EOC grew quickly and is now a stand alone unit reporting to the director of the ARL. Its primary mission is to support the nation's combat forces through technology.
EOC director Dr. Karl Harris gave this explanation for the existence of the Penn State Electro-Optics Center: “Back in the mid-nineties, the Department of Defense saw that there was a need to coordinate all the fragmented research being done in the optoelectronics industry. There are not a lot of people doing this kind of research in the U.S. and the knowledge is very specialized. There was no place the Department of Defense could go for this expertise when they needed something developed within a month or a year. Because of the specialization in the field, the DoD wouldn't know which companies that were bidding on a project had the expertise to carry it out. So the thought was to have a university do this, and Penn State, which already had the Applied Research Lab, won out.”
The EOC is the administrative center for the Electro-Optics Alliance, a growing consortium of over 300 industrial, government, nonprofit, and academic organizations that share their electro-optic expertise and capabilities to carry out projects for the Department of Defense and the Navy.
“We were set up to manage programs and to complement the areas where the Department of Defense did not have expertise,” Harris explained. “We bring the DoD together with the companies in our Alliance, so that our Alliance knows what the DoD is looking for. We can help companies get their prototypes to a point where they are capable of being turned over to a manufacturer. For instance, we recently did the engineering for night sights and for a new Navy telescope. We don't do the manufacturing; that's where the Alliance comes into play. One of our Alliance companies came up with a goggle for night vision that fused image intensifiers with thermal technology in a neat package. The Army Night Vision Lab came to us and said, ‘We'd like to transition this to our soldiers, but the company only has 10 employees and they only have the prototype. Can you help us find a company to do the manufacturing and also can you help us get this into a state where it can be manufactured?’ So we provided funding to that company and set up meetings with a list of companies that were capable of doing the manufacturing. Often what the government is looking for is to combine components that already exist into a new system.”
Along with the management component and a wide-ranging educational outreach, the EOC is divided into five research areas: electro-optic materials design and processing; sensor technology; laser technology; fiber optics and optoelectronics; and reliability and failure analysis. “Some of our equipment is one of a kind,” Harris said. “Because we're new, we've been able to look around and find things that nobody else has. We have the only millimeter wave equipment in the country, which was shipped to us from England to work with. We have a fiber optic machine that is unique. The whole crystal growth facility is something very few universities have the capability of doing.”
Other new additions to their equipment capabilities include a micromachining laser, utilizing dual-pulse laser technology for greatly enhanced cutting and drilling speed; a 10 kilowatt yetterbium-doped fiber laser for military applications; and a nanoindentation capability for testing the hardness, elasticity, toughness, and adhesion of materials at a nanometer depth.
New materials and new processes
A single crystal silicon chip such as this one can cost more than $10,000.
The materials division building is a short ride up the road in a strip of commercial and retail shops. It hardly looks like a high-tech laboratory from the outside, but once through the security at the front door, the 10,000 square feet of lab space and 5,000 square feet of office space are well laid out and bustling with scientists and technicians.
“We currently have 9 engineers, 6 scientists, 9 technicians, 1 administrator, and 12 students working in the Materials Division,” said technical director Dr. Dave Snyder, who gave a tour of the lab. In one lab, five commercial furnaces for crystal growth were lined up along the length of a long room. “We have production size equipment instead of lab size, so we can tie in with industry,” he explained. “We're working with Penn State faculty on a frequent basis. For instance, we're working on a new group of piezoelectric crystals with Tom Shrout, and with Darrell Schlom we're using molecular beam epitaxy of thin film oxides to develop wider bandgap materials with oxides. The Lanagan group is using our microwave loss system, which is a unique system for nondestructive testing.”
Bulk silicon carbide crystal is grown in 2000°C ovens over a period of three days. This is one of the few places in the U.S. that grows bulk crystals, according to Snyder. The resulting single crystal, called a boule, is then cut into thin wafers using an automated diamond multiwire saw, and the wafers are polished using a chemical/mechanical process that is patented by Penn State and licensed to Intrinsic Semiconductor.
A diamond multi-wire saw cuts wafers from a boule.
“We want to come up with new materials or an improved process,” Snyder remarks, casually picking up a $10,000 silicon carbide wafer from a box on a table. Silicon carbide is harder than regular silicon, but more difficult to cut and polish, he remarked. Its hardness makes it a good mirror material, and its high melting point and conductivity make it a semiconductor material of interest for high-power devices. The Materials Division also studies other interesting semiconductor and optical materials, such as synthetic sapphire and gallium nitride. They are expanding their crystal growth capabilities for bulk and thin film growth of piezoelectric materials as well as developing diamond thin films to dissipate heat in electronic devices.
An electro-optics industry requires a trained workforce
Despite its growing importance in major industries such as computing and telecommunications, the electro-optics field is unfamiliar to most students and potential workers. For this reason, the education and outreach element was built into the structure of the original Navy ManTech EOC program. Dr. Wendy Gilpin is the director of education for the EOC.
Optical interferometer with nanometer level accuracy
“Our academic program supports graduate students from Penn State and also a few from CMU, largely in materials,” Gilpin said. “We also have undergraduates from Penn State Kensington, about 10 miles away, who come here to learn equipment and software as part of a 4-year degree in electromechanical engineering. Our big outreach, though, is to K-12, and we especially target middle schoolers. We preach science and engineering in general through school science fairs, as well as bringing students here.” A recent oneweek Electro-Optics Camp for high school students brought 20 juniors and seniors to the EOC to learn more about opportunities in electro-optics. She also travels frequently to Alliance companies to provide workforce training.
To help combat the growing shortage of workers in the field, Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP) has begun a program at its Northpointe campus for the fall of 2006 that integrates college-level electro-optic coursework into the senior high curriculum and can lead to a certificate, 2-year associate degree, or a Bachelor of Science degree in Applied Physics/Electro-Optics at the Indiana campus.
Working with the EOC
The Alliance is open to any U.S. company working in the electro-optics field. There is no fee to join, and the benefits are numerous. “We make it easy to work with the government,” EOC director Harris explained. “Almost every week I'll send out a request for proposals to all the Alliance companies for various projects. It's much quicker than the government, which can take a year to put out a proposal. Most companies will never need to have security clearances, though they do need to be U.S. based. If you can qualify for an SBIR, you can work with us.”
Intellectual property issues are handled through the Penn State IP system. By and large, the EOC is not trying to develop intellectual property. “Whoever brings the idea to the table, they own it,” Harris added.
Faculty may find the quicker turnaround on projects required by DoD contracts takes some getting used to. Most contracts are single year or less and require specific deliverables. Even the recent $5 million, five-year MURI awarded to Mark Horn and colleagues at Penn State to study the science of infrared imaging requires annual results for continued funding. “We live in a contract world, not a grant world here,” Harris said. “But we work with a lot of Penn State faculty,” added Snyder. “We're looking for good stuff and if professors are providing us solutions, then we're happy to fund them.”
In order to grow research to the billion dollar level, Harris believes, Penn State will have to learn how to work with government and industry on the contract model. “If we want to grow our research through working with government and industry, we need to say we're one of the few universities in the country who know how to work with the DoD. We can do contract work; we can do hourly accounting; and we can do classified work.”
Contacts:
Karl Harris, Validate to view address
Dave Snyder, Validate to view address
Wendy Gilpin, Validate to view address
Electro-Optics Center, (724) 295-7000
