VPHA website likely to retire in Aug 2024

Note on the future retiring of the VPHA website. 

The http://vph-ald.com has been paid for, for one more year (I do this personally). Countdown should start for this website; nothing is forever. 

I expect the #VPHA #ALDep website to be up until about August 15, 2024, and then move to history - nicely after #ALDALE2024.

VPHA started about ten years ago, with a visible launch at ALD 2013 conference. In VPHA, the main mission has been accomplished, and it is a good time to wrap up the project and the site. Scientific peer-reviewed publications created:

CVD 2014 ALE essay https://lnkd.in/gcTKZ-Kr
CVD 2015 ML essay https://lnkd.in/gne2sPfA
JVSTA 2017 review https://lnkd.in/gnyhUW5q

More communications should come on the topic of retiring the site later, before site goes down. My goal as the long-lasting VPHA coordinator is, of course, to save the valuable materials created. More on the "how" and "where" parts, as said, later. 

In this post, I already want to express my thankfulness for all who contributed to VPHA - to my recollection this is over 70 people from over 20 countries. Thank you: We can say that we made history. I am also grateful for Tuomo Suntola, on whose support I have always been able to count. 

Related Twitter thread (or, is it X now...): https://twitter.com/rlpuu/status/1685130336366161920?s=20 

In Espoo, Finland, 29.7.2023
Riikka Puurunen

********************* Virtual Project on the History of ALD (VPHA) - in atmosphere of Openness, Respect, and Trust

Wikipedia List of multiple discoveries updated with ALD

The Wikipedia page List of multiple discoveries has been updated by adding ALD in the list of multiple discoveries in the 20th century. With this addition, the VPHA Publication Plan Item 11 "Updating wikipedia" is completed.

The update consists of the addition of the following text:

• The principles of atomic layer deposition, a thin film growth method in its part enabling the continuation of semiconductor device scaling according to the Moore's law in the 2000s, were developed by Soviet scientists Valentin Aleskovsky and Stanislav Koltsov in the early 1960s and independently discovered in 1974 by Tuomo Suntola.^[72][73][74]

The three references mentioned are the three reviews/essays generated in the Virtual Project on the History of ALD:

Advice for new Twitter users

The last weeks have seen increasing activity related to Atomic Layer Deposition in Twitter with the ALD 2016 Ireland conference. Welcome all new ALD tweeters! Anticipating that there will be more individuals and laboratories joining in the near future, here are some tips for beginners from me---I have been an active Twitter for >2 years and have benefited from Twitter in many ways.

(1) When you first sign up for Twitter, you will to choose your unique username - the one starting with @. You can find advice on the internet on how to choose a good one, for example here. ALD scientists have many types of names, for example: @sean_t_barry, @simon_d_elliott, @MikkoRitala, @BMCtheALCHEMIST, @hacp81, @jv3sund, @rlpuu. My advice: choose a username @... that it as short as possible, yet easily recognizable. When someone tweets you, each character of your username will consume of the 140 character limit of a tweet.

New page in ALD History Blog: ALD Glossary

July 30, 2016, a new page has been created in ALD History Blog: ALD glossary: abbreviations and Twitter. While I have been thinking of setting up this page for a long time, the rapidly increasing use of Twitter in the ALD community and the recognition of the "best tweet" at ALD 2016 made the need immediate. The glossary lists (link) are not final but just a start; comments and suggestions for improvements are welcome.

For the Twitter hashtag list, I tried to trace back and describe there the first use of the hashtags. Sometimes, this was easy as the hashtag is uniquely used for ALD (#ALDep, #BalticALD, #FinALD40, ...); sometimes, this is more difficult as the hashtag is in multiple use in Twitter (e.g., #ALD2015, #ALD16, #ALD2016, #VPHA). In Twitter, no-one "owns" a hashtag and anyone can start using whatever they like, also one that is already in use. Twitter is by its nature chaotic; good hashtags are keywords which help to navigate through the chaos.