ALD history and prof. emeritus Markus Pessa (updated)

TEK-lehti wrote on Jan 30, 2017 an excellent article about the Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) at Tampere University of Technology (TUT), mentioning the very special Finnish researcher and inventor, prof. emeritus Markus Pessa who is also the founder and former leader of ORC. Pessa has also influenced the understanding of the history of atomic layer deposition (ALD) within the Virtual Project on the History of ALD (VPHA). The TEK-lehti article inspired me to write in the ALD History Blog also of Pessa's influence.

Many ALD researchers will recognise M. Pessa from early ALD publications. The first scientific article published in Finland on ALD in 1980 (Ahonen et al.) is co-authored by Pessa, and so is the review article in Journal of Applied Physics in 1986, which has been chosen to define the end year of VPHA. Both articles were featured and described in the recommended reading list of early ALD publications in the VPHA JVSTA focused review, http://dx.doi.org/10.1116/1.4971389 (open access).

Pessa has been further related to two puzzling questions which I have encountered during VPHA.  I believe that both questions have received decent answers.

1. When I started to work at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland in 2004, I soon learned from a colleague who had worked at TUT that there is (/was?) an old ALD reactor displayed labelled as "the world's first ALE reactor". When I first heard this, I admit that I was very surprised. How could this be true? ALE was invented in Espoo by Suntola, after all.    
2. I have - of course - been curious of when the Finnish and Soviet ALD scientists first met. When during the past few years I presented the question to several long-term scientists in Finland who were active already in 1990, I got always basically the same answer: the first meeting was at the ALE-1 conference in 1990 in Helsinki, where these researchers "just appeared". How come they "just appeared" there?!? How did they find their way to the conference?  

Copy of the cover of book of programme and abstracts, ALE-1 conference, Espoo/Helsinki, Finland, June 13-15, 1990. 

Nov 29: Story of a cover image, "Reconstruction of the first ALE experiment"

November 29, 2014, it was exactly 40 years since the filing of the first patent on Atomic Layer Epitaxy by Suntola and Antson (FIN 52359). To celebrate this, the Finnish Centre of Excellence on Atomic Layer Deposition (ALDCoE) released the material of the exhibition "40 Years of ALD in Finland - Photos, Stories" (FinALD40) in the internet. Originally, this exhibition had been created for the Baltic ALD 2014 conference in Helsinki, May 12-13, 2014.

Today, one year later, I want to tell you the story behind the cover image of the internet release of the the FinALD40 exhibition material. The cover image is called: "reconstruction of the first ALE experiment" and is shown in the next figure.

"Reconstruction of the first ALE experiment". © Riikka Puurunen 2014

New blog on ALD: "Beneq Blog: A billion seconds"

A new ALD blog has just been initiated: "Beneq Blog: A billion seconds." Link: http://www.beneq.com/blog.

The first post, entitled "Stories from the home of ALD," tells of what the post will be about. Link to the post: http://www.beneq.com/blog/201511/billion-seconds.html. Quoting from under the subsection "Towards a thinner world":

"The plan is to publish in the blog news about our latest products of course, but also to write background stories about the people and technology behind our services. We also want to share our vision about where we believe the business is heading, and report where our displays are used and what our customers do with the soon two hundred Beneq ALD machines around the world."

I warmly welcome the new blog and wish it success! When there are history-related posts, I intend to link to them in this ALD History Blog.

This first post has a very nice photo from Espoo, Finland, of the Lohja factory to produce electroluminescent displays (photo from 1984?). This factory is also mentioned in my (Riikka Puurunen's) recent essay about the history of ALD, "A Short History of Atomic Layer Deposition: Tuomo Suntola's Atomic Layer Epitaxy", published in the Chemical Vapor Deposition journal, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cvde.201402012/full.

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