ALD Stories podcast: Episode 2 on the History of ALD

On October 16, 2020, ALD stories podcast Episode 2 was published, where Riikka Puurunen -- coordinator of the Virtual Project on the History of ALD (VPHA) -- was interviewed by representatives of Beneq Oy.

The Episode 2 was centered around the history of atomic layer deposition (ALD), but was also a "fireside chat" on many other topics. Mentioned were for example: conformality; catalysis; 40 Years of ALD in Finland – Photos, Stories (FinALD40 exhibition); Baltic ALD 2014 conference; story of Suntola’s atomic layer epitaxy; two almost parallel inventions of ALD; Beneq applab opening in St. Petersburg 2013; molecular layering; 1st international conference on atomic layer epitaxy 1990; international ALD conference series; November Networking – ALD at Aalto University; Millennium Technology Prize; Virtual Project on the History of ALD; ALD window; misconception of full monolayer growth per cycle for ideal ALD; conformality test concept & saturation profile & lumped sticking coefficient.

Persons mentioned, at least: Outi Krause, Suvi Haukka, Tuomo Suntola, Sven Lindfors, Arto Pakkala, Victor Drozd, Valentin Aleskovskii, Angel Yanguas-Gil, Jonas Sundqvist. Companies mentioned: Microchemistry, Neste, Beneq, Lohja, Picosun.

This podcast should be interesting for those interested in the history of ALD and the two independent inventions (atomic layer epitaxy and molecular layering). For example, it shares details related to the birth of the two ALD history essays in Chemical Vapor Deposition journal, which have not been presented earlier. 

The podcast is available in at least via:

Molecular Layering in the 2018 Millennium Prize Nomination letter

In 2018, Dr. Tuomo Suntola received the Millennium Technology Prize (MTP) for his groundbreaking work on Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD). In addition to being a personal recognition to Suntola, the MTP 2018 was a great recognition to ALD as an enabler of many technologies and of the continuation of Moore’s law. The whole field has benefited.

In the Virtual Project on the History of ALD (VPHA), materials (publications, Wikipedia updates) have been created which supported the nomination. In summer 2017, it was a natural continuation of VPHA to write the MTP nomination letter for me in the name of my university.

ALD has been invented independently twice - under the name Atomic Layer Epitaxy by Tuomo Suntola in 1974, and under the name Molecular Layering by Valentin Aleskovskii and Stanislav Koltsov already in the 1960s (see, e.g., Wikipedia).

When writing the MTP nomination letter, in addition to describing Suntola’s groundbreaking work and the impact of ALD from all angles, I also - of course - I wanted to acknowledge the pioneering work of Aleskovskii and Koltsov, who both have already passed away.

CU Boulder Today, ALD NanoSolutions, VPHA

CU Boulder Today published on Feb 7, 2017 a nice article describing the history of the company ALD NanoSolutions, a spin-off from the University of Colorado Boulder. ALD NanoSolutions is specialized in atomic layer deposition (ALD) for the coating of particles. Link to article: http://www.colorado.edu/today/2017/02/07/spinoff-company-all-cu-boulder-family.

Some quotes from the CU Boulder Today article:

• In 1997, Professor Alan Weimer of chemical and biological engineering heard a campus talk by Professor Steven George of chemistry about a novel process of coating surfaces with the thinnest of materials possible, known as atomic layer deposition (ALD).
• Within a few years Weimer and George had filed a number of patents on the technology, gaining exclusive rights to a wide range of intellectual property.
• “This company has executed with focus and pragmatism since we formed it, and now we are moving into high gear commercially,” says Weimer. “And we have what I call a lot of high-end ethics within the company, which is very important to all of us. That is one reason we are all still together after all these years.”

My first recollection of ALD NanoSolutions is from early 2000s, from the time I was a doctoral student at Helsinki University of Technology - nowadays Aalto University - in the Industrial Chemistry group of Prof. Outi Krause during 1999 to 2002. My research concerned particle ALD for catalyst applications. I started in 1998 as a diploma worker at Microchemistry Ltd. (nowadays part of ASM) in a research line which had been started many years earlier in Finland by Tuomo Suntola at Microchemistry Ltd. and the Finnish oil company Neste Oy (for more info, see the "Suntola story" in CVD 2014, details below). At HUT, we were of course curious of this new company: who is behind it, what is the technology, how will it commercialize ALD? 

Photo of Riikka after visiting ALD NanoSolutions March 18, 2014. (I cannot recall who took the photograph upon my request.  I will be to happy to add the name of the photographer here if the person who remembers to have taken the photo, will contact me.) 

Fast forward more than a decade. In 2014, I had a chance to travel to Boulder and visit Prof. Steven George and his group. At this moment, I worked as a Senior Scientist at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland.

Thoughts on Open Access, VPHA and figshare

A publication is meant to be public. Many are not, as the journals limit the access to the subscribers of the journals --- the content is published, but not publicly available.

Mid-February, I blogged about "Open research: How sharing can help researchers succeed", linking to an excellent manuscript-in-progress by McKiernan et al. that considers open research aspects from a researcher-centric approach. The manuscript triggered my thinking in many ways, I recommend reading it to others, too. In this blog post, I continue around Open Access and Open Science from my own ALD scientist's viewpoint and from the viewpoint of the VPHA ALD history project, ending with a question: Could we use figshare to share VPHA's material, other than journal articles? Are there other good options?  Discussion on the topic is very much needed and welcome.

2015: a turning point in understanding the history of ALD

Recently, I concluded to a colleague that I think that year 2015 was a turning point in understanding the history of ALD. Maybe it is worth saying publicly in the ALD History Blog, why I think this is the case.

We started the Virtual Project on the History of ALD in 2013. In 2014, we made the FinALD40 exhibition, and there were VPHA presentations at Baltic ALD in Helsinki and the ALD 2014 conference in Kyoto, and I published the Suntola ALE essay. Why then do I think that 2015 was a turning point? There are two main reasons.

1. The International ALD Russia workshop was organized. This workshop brought together original developers of Molecular Layering, other ALD scientists from Russia, and people from the international ALD community, with participants from USA, Finland, The Netherlands, Belgium, Korea, and many more countries. VPHA was not directly involved in this organization; however, I am sure that VPHA had made the time ripe for this event to happen and to be so fruitful. (When I asked the question after Suntola's invited talk at the ALD 2004 conference in Helsinki, time was not yet ripe.) Travel report from the ALD Russia workshop here. 
2. The Molecular Layering - ALD history essay by Malygin et al. was published. This essay is historical, even revolutionary in the way how it describes the massiveness of the Molecular Layering works, which have remained unknown to so many scientist---for reasons which I do not fully understand. If only this essay had the Open Access status, so that everyone could access the information freely! If there are people/organizations who would like to sponsor the Open Access payment for this essay, maybe the status can still be changed.

Under construction in VPHA: ALD Thesis List

Working towards the VPHA ALD History Review (Item #10 in the VPHA Publication Plan), we have in VPHA started to build a list of doctoral theses on ALD worldwide. We do this in file "VPHA-ALD-thesis-list", you find a link at http://vph-ald.com/VPHAopenfiles.html. It is a challenge, and perhaps impossible, to create a complete list. Nevertheless, we will give it a try.

As the first step, information already collected on the Finnish and Soviet/Russian theses was combined (sources: FinALD40 exhibition, ML essay)---thank you Oksana for doing this. Currently, the list contains 134 doctoral theses. Next step is to update the list with theses from other countries: for example, Australia, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Estonia, Germany, France, Korea, India, Japan, Norway, Sweden, The Netherlands, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States...  (excuses already for the countries missing from the list).

VPHA status update email 2016-01-08

The status update below was sent to 41 co-authors and 33 prospective co-authors. 

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Dear VPHA co-authors and prospective co-authors,

This is the first status update email of 2016 and contains information on the following items. A copy the previous status update, sent on December 17, 2015, can be found in the ALD History Blog (with just some sensitive information removed).  

1. Molecular Layering essay has been published
2. Questions for the ALD History Review: deadline Jan 10
3. New participants to join the VPHA ALD 2016 Ireland abstract: deadline Feb 7
4. New co-authors welcome to the ALD history review
5. History of ALD terminology
6. VPHA in numbers - positive progress and still a lot to do
7. More ALD History Blog posts

Countries and VPHA reading statistics, 2016-01-06

The number of co-authors in the ALD-history-evolving-file is now 41, from 12 countries (Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Russia, Sweden, The Netherlands, Turkey). The countries are highlighted in the next map and the exact number of authors per country is shown in the pie graph below.

Author map of ALD-history-evolving-file, January 6, 2016. Shades of grey show countries with VPHA co-authors; the darker the colour, the more there are participating co-authors. Map created with Google spreadsheets.

Pie graph of authors in the ALD-history-evolving-file, January 6, 2016. Created with Google spreadsheets. 

On the importance of defining the problem - What information is missing about the early days of ALD?

"It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem." These words have influenced me ever since I red them as a student of chemical engineering at Helsinki University of Technology (nowadays Aalto University) in mid-1990s. The words were written at the beginning of a chapter in the book of Chemical Reaction Engineering;* I was majoring in industrial chemistry with professor Outi Krause (of ALD, I knew nothing yet). I may have forgotten everything else that was written in that book, but these words made a permanent impact on me.

Beginning of a chapter in the book "Elements of Chemical Reaction Engineering" by H. Scott Fogler.* These words by G. K. Chesterton have stayed in my mind ever since seeing this. Photo by Riikka Puurunen. 

Virtual Project on the History of ALD (VPHA) started from a question: "What are the "Molecular layering" papers by Koltsov from "early 1960's?" This question I asked in the ALD - Atomic Layer Deposition LinkedIn group in the spring 2013. One can still find the question and the lively discussion that followed, here: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/1885076/1885076-238399494.
These words had caught my attention in the ALD Hall of Fame by aldpulse.com; they disturbed me as I did not know what exactly they referred to.

Molecular Layering essay by Malygin et al. published

It is my great pleasure to inform that the essay by Malygin et al. has finally been published. This is Item #8 in the VPHA Publication Plan.

Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cvde.201502013/abstract

Abstract: This essay is dedicated to the history of creation and development of the molecular layering technique (ML) which, in the modern community of non-Russian scientists, is commonly referred to as atomic layer deposition (ALD). Basic research in the field of chemical transformations of solid surfaces using the ML method in the light of the “framework” hypothesis proposed by V. B. Aleskovskii in 1952 is discussed. A number of questions raised by international scientists including those involved in the Virtual Project on the History of ALD (VPHA, 2013), and scientists from conferences in Helsinki (Finland, May 2014.), Kyoto (Japan, June 2014), and personal communications amongst peers are addressed. For the first time in English, this article provides information about V. B. Aleskovskii and S. I. Kol'tsov who are closely associated with development of the ML technique in the Soviet Union. This paper also informs the scientific community about research groups currently engaged in ML research in Russia and introduces the scientific school of “Chemistry of highly organized substances”, founded and supervised by V. B. Aleskovskii. 

VPHA status update email 2015-12-17

The VPHA email update was sent to 39 co-authors and 31 prospective co-authors: 

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Dear current and prospective VPHA co-authors,

It is time for this year’s the last update regarding the Virtual Project on the History of ALD (VPHA). Please find below updates on six topics:

1.    ML essay

2.    Wikipedia update

3.    Recent ALD History Blog posts

4.    VPHA in numbers

5.    Personal invitations to join the ALD history reading

6.    History of ALD terminology 

Significant progress has taken place in VPHA this year. When many small individual contributions are summed up together, the result can be very significant. Thank you for everyone’s contributions, may it be big or small!