Tuesday, August 8, 2006

Its hot in Pullman. I don't think I really like that. I always have a hard time sleeping when its hot out. I've decided that I'm perfectly happy at about 68 degrees F. Its cool enough that wearing jeans isn't troublesome, and warm enough that one doesn't fall on ones muscular white buttocks walking down the hill. (Ice really gets to be a problem in Pullman in the winter time. Turns out.)

Today was actually remarkably productive. Yesterday I did the first half of making a selective boron doped wafer, namely I masked, etched and doped one side of it, a process that takes about 6 hours all told. Two of those six hours is just waiting for the boron to diffuse into the wafer sufficiently. Today I did the other half, masking the other side, then putting it in BOE (a nasty acid) for a long time to theoretically etch off the silicon oxide and the layer of boron glass that forms on the surface during the doping process. (This picture explains it all in better detail.) The problem of the day was: how long should I leave it in the BOE. If I leave it in too long, the BOE will etch sideways through the oxide layer on the bottom, screwing up the windows I'm trying to etch into it. If I don't leave it in long enough, a layer of boron glass will remain on the surface of the wafer, preventing it from etching at all, which is what happened to my last wafer. It seems that as time goes on I'm leaving a swath of useless wafers in my path. . .

So to try to figure out how long to leave it in the BOE I went and talked to some people who in theory know more than I do. Mostly because they're older. And have been doing it longer. But mostly the older thing. Anyway, I showed Jeong (our resident South Korean) what I was doing, and he was convinced that the doping process didn't form a glass layer on the wafer, which would mean that I had f-ed up my wafer in some other way than I had thought. Normally I'd bow to his greater experience, but there was a recipe in the old clean room that was for removing the glass layer from the wafer. "Why" thought I, "would there be a recipe for removing something that doesn't exist?" So I went and found Dylan, who seems to be the most on top of things as far as grad students go. He told me that the boron does in fact form a glass layer just as I had thought, and also that my process should work. His caveat was that whenever other people needed to selectively boron dope, they just wiped out the oxide on both sides and grew a new one. Doing that would further complicate my life because I would have to do yet another long bake time process on each wafer. Dylan's faculty advisor Dr. Bahr seemed to think my process should work as well though, so I think I'm going to go ahead with it. They recommended an hour BOE time, which is what I'm going to go do tomorrow.

So all of this took about 5 hours today. Hurray for another 50 bucks. Before taxes. Darn government. (Realizes the irony of the previous statement given said current employment at a government institution.)

Sitting at my computer at about 8:00 this evening I decided that I should check out what classes I'm taking next semester. It looks like the line up is: Mechatronics and associated lab, Thermodynamic Systems (which given previous experience in both Thermodynamics and System Dynamics anticipate to be just loads of fun) Mechanical Design, and two Material Science Engineering (MSE) classes: Metals and Polymers. It should keep me busy. I just hope that dear Dr. Johns doesn't teach both metals and polymers. His MSE 301 class which I took last fall required more studying for a class than I have ever had to do. That includes that lame test I had to take in 5th grade about all the explorers in the 1700s and what countries they went to. Thank you Mom for teaching me how to make/use flashcards. I have a whole pile of them still that say things like: "strength", "ductility", "toughness", "hardness" etc on one side, and their associated definition on the other. The really frustrating part about John's tests and quizzes is he asks for things out of the reading that most people don't pay much attention to. Like, the units on the axes of a particular graph out of the chapter. Yeah, its in the reading, but who honestly looks for that?

Anyway, in looking to see what classes I was going to be in, I came across the schedule surfer for WSU classes. Basically, you type in the class number, and it shows you in a graphical format what blocks of time your classes fill. Pretty handy program. Pretty irritating too. Ostensibly, its set up so students can see when their classes meet so they can arrange their classes to their liking. The frustrating thing is that the schedule surfer doesn't interface with any other part of the class selection system. Its a Java applet that I assume is given a listing of all the classes when they're assigned, then sits all alone in cyberspace. The practical irritation of this is when you have your schedule all set up how you like, you can't just click a button to have it send the info to sign you up for those classes. Instead you have to go to another page and type in all the class numbers again. And you'd better pray that the class still has seats available, otherwise you have to go back into the schedule surfer and have it spit out a whole new list of classes and course numbers. Also, it would be really nice if it could look at what classes you're registered for and fill itself in without you having to type the class numbers in every time you close the applet.

Long story short, I decided to learn Java to see if I can't make a better version of the program. I figure if I get it done by next semester, it'll be one less irritant that I have to deal with, and if I get it done by the end of the school year, I'll maybe be able to pass it down to some future generation of Coug. I found a pretty insightful online textbook (its free and legal) but the part I can't figure out is how to compile java code properly. I'll have to do some more digging for that.

At midnight(ish) I went for a run, as is my custom. It was cool enough outside by then to be rather pleasant. It was a really clear night, and there was a full moon, which was kind of cool. I ran 2.25 miles, which is about as far as I've ever run. I almost lost track of how many times I ran around the track. I can't imagine how Dave runs marathons. I listen to an audio book that’s pretty entertaining, but I get kind of bored after just 20 minutes. How does one keep running after 2 hours? Crazy people. In slightly related news, I came across a 60 minutes episode in which a guy was interviewed who wrote a book about how weird Florida is. The guy had a folder of news clippings of all the bizarre things people do there. One of them was a guy who slept with two live alligators. Yes, slept with them in the way your raised eyebrow insinuates.

Anyway, on that note, I'm going to bed.