The Kurt J. Lesker Company and Penn State University have launched the Kurt J. Lesker Company Atomic Scale Processing Center of Excellence (ASPIRE), housed in Penn State's Nanofabrication Laboratory at the Millennium Science Complex.
ASPIRE pairs KJLC's atomic layer deposition (ALD) and atomic layer etching (ALE) equipment with Penn State's research and characterization infrastructure to develop and validate atomic-scale processing recipes for semiconductor, quantum, photonic, and advanced packaging technologies recipes that will ultimately be shared with KJLC customers and academic researchers.
The center formalizes a research relationship that recently produced the world's first ferroelectric aluminum-scandium nitride (AlScN) thin films grown by plasma-enhanced ALD, published in a Nature Portfolio journal. As Kurt Lesker IV, President and CEO of Kurt J. Lesker Company, said at the launch: "The future of advanced technology will be built one atomic layer at a time."