Fall 1996

In This Issue

JOHN G. LINVILL - THE MODEL FOR ACADEMIC ENTREPRENEURSHIP

by James F. Gibbons

As we dedicate the original CIS conference room to John Linvill, I would like to share some thoughts about the enormous impact John has had on the Electrical Engineering Department , the School of Engineering and Stanford University, especially because our ideas about how to build workable partnerships were formulated and proven first in the Center for Integrated Systems. I will offer first a brief history of the academic developments that led eventually to the formation of the CIS, as an illustration of how a uniquely capable academic entrepreneur goes about creating opportunity and accomplishment at a University.

In the appointment papers Fred Terman submitted to the Provost to secure John's appointment to the Stanford faculty, Terman described John as "the person we need to transistorize the electrical engineering curriculum at Stanford." Indeed, that is where John started, offering courses that included new approaches to circuit theory that were appropriate for transistor circuit design and also the famous device modeling technique that went under the name of Linvill lumped models. Those contributions represented in themselves a sufficient basis for a distinguished career as an EE faculty member. But Fred got a lot more than he knew. In fact, he had hired a person who proved to be his equal as an academic entrepreneur. Let me explain.

Where most people would have been well satisfied to simply "transistorize the curriculum," it was clear to John that there was a great deal more that could be done. He realized it would be important to have a laboratory where students could build semiconductor devices as part of their Ph.D. research; and he called me back from a research career that I had started at Bell Labs to start what eventually became the Solid State Electronics Laboratory. I well remember that nearly every university and every industrial lab who heard of this plan thought success would be very unlikely. After all, device research and device fabrication had always been the province of industry. And with some notable exceptions, universities that worked in the field of electronic devices tended to work on very esoteric problems in which there was little real interest. Why should semiconductors be different? The year was 1957.

John G. Linvill

Fortunately, while we were aware of the prevailing logic and the possibility of failure that it contained, we were undeterred by it. But that was not where John's insight ended. He realized that the technology we needed to acquire was only available in industry, and that what he needed to do was to arrange for what we would call today a technology transfer, in this case from industry to the university. So he hired me at Stanford, and immediately deployed me to the Shockley Semiconductor Fabs, first to learn the technology and then bring it back to Stanford. ...

I cannot mention all of the contributions made, most through some combination of faculty and students. Suffice it to say that by the mid-70's Stanford had both a Solid State Lab and an Integrated Circuits Lab of considerable distinction, both initiated by John's ability to understand before nearly anyone else when a fundamental development in industry would lead to a dramatic change in the curriculum. When he saw such an event, his strategy was to hire faculty and start a research program in the new area, letting knowledge percolate into both the graduate and the undergraduate curriculum over time. That is an essential attribute of a research university. But leadership in a university (i.e., boss-less) environment has to be offered with a light touch, and preferably with a selfless dedication to the development and welfare of others. John Linvill possesses these characteristics in abundance.

In each case, it took a decade or so for these labs to develop their stature. The time scale is probably best measured in graduate student lifetimes, which I take to be about five years. In three graduate student generations, or a period of 12-15 years, six faculty working at the average productivity rate for Stanford EE faculty can graduate nearly 100 Ph.D. students, who will carry the message about the program to the world beyond El Camino. ...

Clockwise: John Linvill, Marjorie Linvill, Jim Gibbons, Rick Reis, Lynn Gibbons, Joe Goodman

By the end of the 70's, however, we needed something more than the Solid State and IC labs could provide. What we thought we needed was a facility to build chips that faculty and their students would design for general application in information technologies. And we realized that we could build a partnership with industry that would not only provide for the construction of a new facility, but also permit us to create new processes for both education and bi-directional technology transfer. What emerged was the CIS visitors program that brought industry visitors to Stanford for extended periods; and the FMA program that took Ph.D. students to industrial labs for portions of their Ph.D. research. I recall especially John's excitement over the creation of the FMA program, and his selection of Rick Reis as the person to manage it.

Perhaps the most dramatic early success of this new lab came from the research group of John Hennessy in the conceptualization and first designs of the MIPS chip. That work, and work done in CSL by Jim Clark and his students on the graphics chip, led eventually to the formation of Silicon Graphics and MIPS Computing Systems, of course, and many ideas that formed the basis for exciting research and sometimes the formation of new companies. The newest example from CSL is perhaps Rambus; from ICL is probably Yahoo!; and the newest from ISL is Amati.

I cite these examples to point out that something more than curricular change is now being generated with increasing frequency. It is only a short distance from curricular change to economic impact. And the CIS Laboratory, through the National Nanofabrication Users Network and other efforts, is doing something increasingly close to what it was created to do: build chips for a wide variety of university and corporate clients across the country. It is changing the curriculum in many places and serving as an advanced fab shop for new business opportunities.

No one could have predicted the extraordinary impact that work done in the CIS over the last decade or so would have. But the model we set up did contain the seeds of such change. And it is that model that I want to discuss now, as it defines a model for partnership with industry that we hope to use repeatedly in the future.

The CIS model was designed to incorporate industry insight from the beginning, from a group of companies that could help us design and execute a forward looking research agenda. That of course distinguishes the CIS from a typical affiliates program, which is a viewing window, not a collaborative research partnership. And the success of the CIS example has encouraged us to apply the model elsewhere -- partnerships that connect the School of Engineering in manufacturing to the Graduate School of Business, in biomedical partnerships to the School of Medicine with the pharmaceutical and health care industries. The newest partnership now in the conceptual stage will connect the School of Engineering to the Law School and the Economics Department to improve our understanding of how to create an insurance industry that can deal effectively with catastrophic risks. In every case we seek a creative combination of university and industry insights to define our research agenda and to help us find the support we need to deliver on it. ...

John and Marjorie Linvill

In all of this, you can identify repeatedly the legacy of John Linvill. His fingerprints are everywhere. Much of his entrepreneurship seems to have been triggered by an event that he could see would lead to significant curricular change, change that was best developed by new faculty actively pursuing a new research agenda, often in a laboratory that did not exist at the time. But increasingly across the 40 year span of time over which he provided personal leadership, he generated models that enabled us to incorporate sophisticated industrial insight directly into the university's research and development plan.

The culmination of that effort was the CIS model for a collaborative university -industry research partnership that is now finding its way across the university. The man most responsible for it is John Linvill. John, you will always have our deepest appreciation and our warmest thanks.

As an occupant of AEL for two decades, I can remember more than 50 Ph.D. students from my group alone who worked there and developed several generations of process and device simulators. I was even more impressed to hear about the pioneering MOS modeling efforts of Moll and Inthola and the key ideas and technology innovations of Jim Gibbons in ion implantation that also had roots in these buildings. The process of bulldozing the old infrastructure to make way for the new indeed causes one to think about what new innovations the next 40 years will bring.

In looking at the research agenda for CIS for the coming years, there are two or three themes that deserve special discussion. As noted in our earlier newsletters, the three broad areas -- systems prototyping, circuit design and supporting technologies for building integrated systems -- comprise the primary research themes. In this newsletter, I will comment on a very broad and aggressive technology program that we have launched related to interconnects (and MEMS). In the winter and spring issues of the newsletter, we will consider the other research thrusts and seed projects.

Four research projects are now targeted to cover the frequency spectrum from photons to electrostatic MEMS structures. We are delighted to welcome Prof. David Miller (formerly of Bell Labs) to the Ginzton Laboratory and to support his efforts to explore and develop optical device and interconnect technologies. In the domain of radio frequencies (RF), Professors Tom Lee and Simon Wong are teaming up to consider not only the technology and modeling issues of RF interconnects (and supporting necessary passive tuning components) but also to demonstrate circuits that exploit these innovations.

Zhiping Yu and Bob Dutton with C.K. Lin, General Manager, Motorola Semiconductor Tianjin Plant

Professors Krishna Saraswat and Greg Kovacs, along with Dr. Jim McVittie, have teamed up in two related projects in the area of low dielectric constant materials. These projects are technology intensive and directly leverage our CIS efforts to attract, team with and support the semiconductor equipment industrial partners as reflected by Applied Materials and Lam Research. Professor Greg Kovacs' efforts in exploiting advanced MEMS technologies to create RF switches requires not only dielectric materials but low sticking coefficient materials needed in electrostatically deflected structures. We are looking forward to growing partner interaction with these projects, including both end-user application companies as well as from our technology- development partners.

As mentioned above, over the next two issues we will highlight the other areas and projects that the CIS research program is supporting including some of the systems level challenges that accompany the technology-based projects outlined here. However, it is clear that there is a paradigm shift unfolding across the spectrum of system operating frequencies in response to the limits imposed by interconnects and other parasitic effects. CIS is pleased to launch cutting edge programs in support of these essential areas for research.

Bob Dutton
CIS Director of Research
650/725-3709
dutton@gloworm.stanford.edu
http://www-tcad.stanford.edu/tcad/bios/dutton.html

The Paul Allen Visit to the Center for Integrated Systems
June 11, 1996

Paul Allen and representatives of his Palo Alto company, Interval Research, came to Stanford campus June 11, 1996 to view the expanded CIS building which was made possible in large part due to Mr. Allen's gift to the School of Engineering.

Stanford University President Gerhard Casper, John Freidenrich, Chairman, Stanford University Board of Trustees, and James F. Gibbons, then Dean of the School of Engineering hosted a party in the courtyard of the new CIS extension wing.

Paul Allen joins D'Cuckoo to play "Take Me to the River."

Faculty, staff and students who use the facility were all invited to the celebration which included live music by D'Cuckoo, a favorite band of Mr. Allen's. Allen, accompanied by David Liddle, President and CEO of Interval Research, toured the building and met with faculty and students who conduct research there.

The new CIS Extension provides 52,000 gross square feet to service the space requirements of the following:

• The Integrated Circuits Laboratory (ICL) which specializes in physics and technology of semiconductor devices, on their application to integrated systems, and on the problems associated with manufacturing chips. Researchers are interested in the limits of integrated circuit technology, how very small devices work, and how very complex chips can be competitively manufactured.
• The Solid State Laboratory (SSL) which specializes in semiconductor materials and devices, nanostructures built with semiconductor technology, and the physics of very small structures. There is a close connection between the work of these researchers and the rest of the research being conducted in CIS.
• The future billets in the advanced material research field.

Greg Kovacs, Gerhard Casper, Paul Allen

The space includes:


1. Wet Laboratory 7,800 gsf (gross square feet)
2. Dry Laboratory 6,500 gsf
3. Office/Conf.Rms. 35,500 gsf
4. Gas Vault 2,200 gsf

The construction was completed in March 1996. Currently the lab fit up work is still ongoing. The total construction cost is $14.3M, the total project cost is $18.3M. Antoine Predock is the architect. DPR is the contractor.

In addition to Mr. Allen's gift, the following donors contributed to make the building possible:

• Apple Computer, Inc.
• Peter G. Behr
• Estate of Eleanor Buchanan
• Cypress Semiconductor Corp.
• Estate of James D. Fleming
• Ford Motor Company
• William R. Hewlett
• Raychem Corporation
• Xerox Corporation

---

CTS's main focus is of course on telecommunications research. SIMA is a joint center between the Graduate School of Business and the School of Engineering concentrating on a wide range of technical and managerial manufacturing issues across all industrial sectors, not just the semiconductor and computer industries.

Obviously, the content areas and activities of each of these centers differ enough to enable certain companies to benefit from membership in more than one center. In fact, five CIS partner companies are also members of CTS and six CIS partner companies are also members of SIMA.

While maintaining center independence is important, some overlap among centers in terms of research, faculty and students is both inevitable and desirable. Where this overlap occurs, centers and their partner companies mutually benefit from the sharing of resources, ideas and industrial contacts.

During the last few years CIS and CTS have had overlapping research programs in two areas: (1) adaptive video and (2) management in a wireless network environment. These projects have helped to define critical parameters such as scalability of data compression and simulations of mobile activity traces that can help to model communication scenarios with varying complexity.

Additional collaborations among CTS and CIS faculty are planned for 1996-97. These collaborations have resulted in a cross-fertilization of ideas not only among faculty and students, but among the five joint center sponsors: Advanced Micro Devices, Ericsson, Hewlett-Packard, Phillips and Texas Instruments.

CIS and SIMA recently took a step towards greater collaboration by agreeing to jointly sponsor two research projects for 1996-97. By last spring SIMA had received a number of faculty proposals for support. Four of these proposals covered topics of potential interest to CIS member companies. The four proposals were presented to the CIS sponsors at the May 1996 CIS Advisory Committee meeting, at which time it was agreed that CIS and SIMA would co-sponsor two of the proposals.

The first of these efforts involves one faculty member from electrical engineering (Robert Helms) and one from mechanical engineering (Ron Hanson) in the development of multiplexed diode-laser absorption sensors for process control and emissions monitoring in semiconductor manufacturing.

The second effort involves two faculty from mechanical engineering (Mark Capelli and Fritz Prinz) who will study the manufacture of functional gradient thermal substrates for use in the packaging of high power electronic components such as power semiconductors and microprocessors.

In addition to being a cost effective way of supporting selected research projects, cross-center collaborations are a method of bringing faculty from different departments together in ways that might otherwise not have occurred. We have already seen evidence of this cross-fertilization in the visits of SIMA faculty and research associates to the CIS laboratory and in the use of some CIS equipment by the mechanical engineering department.

We will monitor the success of these initial efforts with an eye toward future joint research presentations and further industrial collaborations. Done with care and on a selective basis where merited, such cross-center sponsorship of research projects can be a win-win situation for both the centers and their industrial partners.

IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY

After two full days of presentations of the students' research, overview talks about the work being accomplished in IBM Research and in SRDC, one-on-one meetings with managers and engineers, tours, demonstrations and food, six tired PhD students and one travel-weary professor boarded the plane at Stewart-Newburgh airport for the flight back to sunny CA and the Silicon Valley.

IBM engineers and managers in attendance at the students' presentations and one-on-ones were thrilled to hear about the work of Navakanta Bhat, Y. K. Leung, Grant McFarland, Won Namgoong, Sha Rabii, and T. C. Yang.

It was also a privilege to have Prof. Tom Lee of the Integrated Circuits Laboratory join the students and make numerous contacts with interested IBM managers and potential mentors for the Stanford students in their research projects.

IBM Microelectronics Division S/C R&D Center, East Fishkill, NY

The Stanford group learned about the work taking place at the T. J. Watson Research Lab from Dr. Mike Polcari, Advanced Silicon Laboratory Director, and other research managers from Watson Labs. At the Microelectronics SRDC Laboratory the students were introduced to the projects being undertaken in East Fishkill S/C R & D Center by Russ Lange, Director of SRDC Technical Strategy Planning and President of the IBM Academy, as well as other engineering project leaders.

Day 2 concluded with a tour of the ASTC (Advanced Semiconductor Technology Center), a Class 1 advanced piloting facility involved in the development of 64 Mb/256 Mb/1 Gb DRAM technology as well as advanced CMOS device technology with dimensions down to 0.25 and 0.18 um.

We hope the six Stanford students and Prof. Lee enjoyed the visit as much as IBM enjoyed having them. We hope the interaction will continue into the future and that other groups of Stanford PhD students and faculty will come to eastern NY to enjoy the green hills of summer!!

Ronald W. Knepper
Former CIS Visitor from IBM
IBM Microelectronics Division
Hopewell Junction, NY

Since the first grants were approved in April 1994, a total of 44 grants have been approved for a total current commitment of approximately $300,000. Of the 44 grants, only 13 have been issued to Primary Investigators (PIs) from Stanford University, SLAC, or the Stanford Medical Center, while the remaining 31 grants have been issued to PIs from a total of 17 different academic institutions. Usage statistics show that approximately $240,000 in actual usage charges have been accumulated to date. Thus, it would appear that most grant recipients are able to gain entry to the lab and begin their experimental work promptly.

Highlights of the CIS User Grant program include:

• User Grants appear to be immensely popular with the academic community and seem to be providing the means to test some new and exciting ideas -- ideas which would otherwise go unexamined, or would, at the very least, be significantly delayed until more traditional sources of funding could be found.
• The National Science Foundation, which sponsors the National Nanofabrication Users Network (NNUN), is both aware of and impressed by the CIS User Grant program. We hope the NSF will establish a User Grant program of their own to sponsor projects elsewhere within the NNUN.
• The User Grant program is apparently filling a gap for the many PIs who have government-sponsored (especially NSF) contracts or grants which provide adequate funding for salaries, but little, if any, funding to cover laboratory expenses.
• By providing a largely "independent" source of laboratory funding, one unexpected benefit of the User Grant program is its actual encouragement of multi-institutional collaborations, apparently by eliminating the need for contention over who pays which bill. Examples of such collaborative programs include Prof. Simon Wong (Stanford), Prof. Michael Spencer (Howard), and Prof. Mikael Ostling (KTH in Sweden) looking at the properties of MIS structures with an AlN dielectric layer deposited on SiC substrates; Prof. Tom Pearsall (U. of Washington) and Prof. Cal Quate (Stanford), each with research programs investigating aspects of nanolithography using scanning probes, have found their efforts complement each other's.

Finally, the success of the CIS User Grant program can perhaps best be evaluated by examining feedback from its participants. We recently received the following e-mail from one of the User Grant recipients:

Hi John,

As you know, I am a Ph.D. graduate student at the University of Colorado. As a part of my thesis, I am researching methods to improved liquid-crystal-on-silicon microdisplays (miniature displays constructed from CMOS chips attached to liquid crystal cells). One of the problems in using silicon chips in optical systems is the potential for photo-generated leakage currents to degrade data storage and hence the image on the display. A method for reducing this effect is to planarize the silicon and add a new layer of metal for light shielding. At C.U., we were able to develop a method of planarizing the silicon, but were not equipped to add metal and form contacts to the shielding layer.

The CIS-SNF User Grant has given us the opportunity to perform this post-processing. I was trained in one week to use the equipment required for the processing. Masks were fabricated at Stanford from design data generated at C.U. I spent another week at Stanford proving out the process by fabricating a via chain test chip. We are now in the position to spend another week or two processing the display devices and finish our display improvement work. This time schedule would not have been possible without the SNF and CIS User Grant. It has saved me approximately 6 months to a year of time in my thesis, and has given me to the feeling of ownership in the work that I was personally able to process.

Thanks to the SNF, NSF, and CIS User Grant Program!

Miller Schuck
University of Colorado at Boulder

Awards and Announcements

Congratulations are in order for several CIS affiliated faculty!

Bob Dutton CIS Director of Research and Professor of Electrical Engineering

Mary Baker Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Mary Baker has been named a Frederick A. Terman Fellow, cited by the Terman Awards committee as "a key contributor in Stanford's thrust in mobile communications, [whose] research draws great interest from industrial partners in the Center for Telecommunications." Her research group's MosquitoNet project is a testbed for research into operating system and application issues in mobile and wireless computing. William Hewlett and David Packard, both alumni of the Electrical Engineering Department at Stanford and founders of the Hewlett-Packard Co., first endowed the Terman Fellowships in 1994 with a $25 million gift as a tribute to the late provost Terman, to whom they gave credit for much of their own success, as well as that of Stanford and the Silicon Valley.

Editor:
Harrianne Mills
650/725-3626

Send comments, suggestions to: coordinator@cis.stanford.edu WWW URL: http://cis.stanford.edu/news/

Updated 2/9/97