In August, Dr. Nancy Johnson joined the MNTL staff as principal research scientist, overseeing the operations within the cleanroom facility, which is used by 50 faculty and 350 students across the campus.
Johnson has an extraordinarily broad level of semiconductor research experience that literally spans the globe and includes stints in industry, academia, and a national laboratory. She started her career as a process engineering technician at Intel Corp. in the 1980’s while studying for her master’s degree at the University of New Mexico. Working in a production environment at Intel, she carried out process troubleshooting and development in the photolithography and etch production processes for the company’s silicon CMOS ULSI memory and ASIC devices.
After the Intel years, she worked as a senior technical officer at one of Australia’s largest national research organizations, CSIRO; earned her doctorate in semiconductor physics from Macquarie University in Australia; and established new processes in the semiconductor nanofabrication cleanroom at UNSW in Australia where she worked as a senior researcher and acted as the nano-fabrication process manager.
When she left UNSW to move to the Cavendish Laboratory in the United Kingdom, she had some ideas about how to streamline the photolithography processing, and subsequently she designed and patented a novel process for fabricating electrically reprogrammable photolithography masks. She began commercialization of the technology in 2005 with a start-up company she cofounded while at the University of Cambridge in England.
“Over the years, I added experience to the litho and etch process background I had from Intel and developed new processes such as multi-layer EBL, optimized ohmic contact metallization, GaN thin film deposition for GaAs-based devices such as MMICs, HEMTs and self-aligned SETs,” Johnson said. “I have a lot of process experience with many different pieces of equipment, so I’m excited to share that knowledge with MNTL students.”
Johnson was drawn to Illinois for two reasons—proximity to family and the impressive work being done at MNTL. “I like the variety and flexibility of the research,” she said. “MNTL is doing a lot of exciting micro, nano, and bio research projects.”
Johnson’s main job is to help the building’s six research engineers get the best processes out of the existing MNTL equipment and upgrade tools wherever possible. If a student or researcher wants to make a device that isn’t compatible with existing equipment, then she plans to tap into her global network for help.
“I can check with colleagues elsewhere to see if they can grow or etch material for me that we may not have here,” she said. “I’ll parlay my professional contacts from the past to help MNTL researchers reach their goals.”
She’s also excited to bring her industry perspective to MNTL operations. “I’m eager to cast my eye over the equipment and see if there are ways to make things more flexible or efficient,” Johnson said. “I’m keen to bring in some of the industry ideas and discipline. At the same time, I know I’ll learn a lot coming to MNTL.”