ALD thesis list contains 297 entries - which ones are missing?

During the last months, we have in VPHA been collecting a list of ALD theses made worldwide. At ALD 2016, I discussed with many professors and researchers, who agreed to check the theses list what comes to their own labs/universities. To make it easy to spot the missing ones, the number of PhD-equivalent theses per country is collected in the table below, and the thesis list (including also "professor's theses") is shown below, ordered per country.

In March 2016 (post here), there were 274 PhD-equivalent theses listed; now, there are 297. How many would we be missing still? I believe that there are theses missing still at least from USA (the George group, @GeorgeGroupCU), Belgium (IMEC/KU Leuven) and Japan, and probably from other countries/universities, too. The full thesis info can be seen in the VPHA-ALD-thesis-list. When you spot missing info, you can write the additions directly in the file VPHA-thesis-to-be-added.

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.

ALD history at ALD 2016 Ireland

Prof Greg Parsons introducing Prof Anatoly Malygin to give a plenary talk at ALD 2016. Photo by Riikka Puurunen.

The ALD 2016 conference was a major step forward in advancing the understanding of the worldwide history of Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD). Progress took place at least in three ways:

1. Prof. Anatoly Malygin (St. Petersburg State Technological Institute (Technical University)) delivered an invited talk. ALD 2016 was the first time ever that a person representing the branch of ALD of "old Russian works" has presented a talk at the international ALD conferences. Great thanks Prof. Malygin delivering the talk as well as for the conference chairs Dr. Simon Elliott and Dr. Jonas Sundqvist for inviting him.

Early ALD publications with one VPHA comment

Continuing on the post of yesterday, listing early ALD publications with so far no comments in VPHA's ALD-history-evolving-file, here is the list of publications (up to 1986) with just one comment. Many publications in Russian, some in German, English, Bulgarian and Finnish. 

Of course, a question is: have we listed all publications up to 1986? We can never be completely sure; the list is as complete as the co-authors make it. Participants of ALD 2016 and other experts: you are most welcome to join the ALD history reading to help us perfect and complete the work! To join, please contact us at the conference or email info@ vph-ald.com. 

Evolution of the VPHA reading up to July 22, 2016 (total completion status 67%). April-June 2016 saw rapid increase in # comments given due to active coordination. 

Early ALD publications with zero comments - VPHA welcomes more volunteers

The ALD History Project VPHA has progressed well during the first half of 2016, see e.g. the poster to be presented at ALD 2016 Ireland next week. The work is not competed yet, however: e.g., we have 16 early ALD publications which have no "VPHA comments" yet and the overall reading progress status is 67%.  

The table below shows all 16 publications listed in ALD-history-evolving-file with zero comments. The list includes publications in Bulgarian, English, German, Japanese, and Russian. The list clearly contains some historically important paper, for example:

• publication by Pakkanen and Lindblad (in English), likely to be the very first density functional theory approach for ALD chemistry; and 
• publication by Jun-ichi Nishizawa (in Japanese), likely to be the very first ALD/ALE paper from Japan. 

We will organize one more reading-distribution round in VPHA, to get the early ALD publications (up to 1986) read and commented. Target is that all publications should be commented by three people; one comment per publication is the absolute minimum. After the completion of the reading, we plan to re-open the voting to refine the recommended reading list, the first version of which is published in the ALD 2016 poster (voting will be re-opened open maximum for some weeks). More volunteers are still welcome to join the ALD history reading&voting, to help us complete the work. If you'd like to volunteer, please contact us e.g. through emailing info@ vph-ald.com. 

At ALD 2016 Ireland, there will be many VPHA volunteers around. The final VPHA poster co-author and affiliation list can be found at the end of this post. The co-author lists includes e.g. the conference chairs, several invited speakers, and some leading professors.

VPHA ALD 2016 poster ready & next steps

The message below was sent on July 19 to all VPHA co-authors (70) and listed prospective co-authors (31). VPHA's poster at ALD 2016 poster can be found here. VPHA will have still one reading & commenting round and welcomes more participants.  

--- 

From: Puurunen Riikka
Sent: 19. heinäkuuta 2016 10:23
Subject: VPHA ALD 2016 poster ready & next steps

Dear VPHA co-authors and prospective co-authors,

VPHA poster to the ALD 2016 conference is now finalized. You can find a copy of it in the vph-ald.com website: http://vph-ald.com/VPHApublications/VPHA-poster_July2016_FINAL_2016-07-19.pdf. The main content and novelty of the poster is the recommended reading list of early ALD publications, which came out from the VPHA voting made in May-June.

VPHA communication: ALD 2016 Ireland poster DRAFT for commenting / DL Jul 5

Email sent to 70 VPHA co-authors. 

---

Dear VPHA co-authors,

Please find attached the first general draft of the VPHA poster for the ALD 2016 Ireland conference for commenting. The abstract text of our poster is copied below as a reminder.

This version of the poster has been worked out together with the core organizational group of VPHA (Koshtyal, Pedersen, Puurunen, Sundqvist, van Ommen, Yurkevich). The main content of the poster is the result of the VPHA voting. In addition to the 22 publications which are included in the table and form the “recommended reading list” (all voted for by minimum of four persons), there was a long list of publications, which three to one persons had voted for. For this poster, we have to keep the list short; however, we understand that this list not the “one and the only truth” and many significant publications remain outside of this list.  

VPHA communication: ALD 2016 flash presentation

The message below was sent to 70 co-authors and 29 prospective co-authors. 

---

Dear VPHA co-authors and prospective co-authors,

Today I have submitted slides of a 2-min “flash presentation” of the VPHA poster to the ALD 2016 Ireland conference. The slides are available through the vph-ald.com website, direct link: http://vph-ald.com/VPHApublications/VPHA-flash-presentation_ALD2016_2016-06-20.pdf. I think that the voting result nicely highlights ALD work of different types made at different locations.  

By the way: did you all already view the essay by Malygin et al. in Chem. Vap. Deposition 2015 (DOI: 10.1002/cvde.201502013)? Prof. A. A. Malygin has a very nice slot for his historical invited talk at ALD 2016: at the plenary opening session on Monday morning at 9:00. I am looking forward to his talk, and of course all talks and informal discussions at the conferences, too.

http://vph-ald.com/VPHApublications/VPHA-flash-presentation_ALD2016_2016-06-20.pdf

VPHA communication: >500 points by thirty people received in voting

The email below was sent to 70 co-authors and 29 prospective co-authors.

---  

Dear VPHA co-authors and prospective co-authors,

Voting to create a conclusive recommended reading list of early ALD publications  to the ALD 2016 poster has now ended. Voting deadline was June 15th, all VPHA co-authors were allowed to participate, rules were announced here. 

An amazing number of 507 points were collected in the voting, given by an as-amazing number of thirty (30) people.  (At the moment, VPHA has 70 co-authors.) Many thanks for all those who participated in the voting! The large participation ensures that the result is created by collective wisdom and not dominated by the views of only few individuals. 

VPHA communication: voting + organizational abstract to BALD2016

The email below was sent to 68 co-authors and 31 prospective co-authors. 

----

Dear VPHA co-authors and prospective co-authors,

I would like to communicate quick updates on the status of VPHA again.

VPHA voting.

Today is the DL to participate in the voting for the "conclusive recommended reading list" for the ALD 2016 poster. So far, we have collected 299 points. Thank you for the many people who have voted. Everyone who votes, will be a co-author of the planned publication to JVSTA, which reports the "conclusive recommended reading list." Tommorrow I will start to prepare the poster on the basis of the information received.

Those, who did not vote yet, have still some time to submit the vote (link to VPHA-voting-ENTRY-file).

BALD 2016, St Petersburg.

(1) The abstract submission deadline of BALD 2016 (http://bald2016.ru/) has been postponed by the organizers and is now June 25^th.

(2) I have been presented with the possibility of delivering an invited talk at the conference regarding the history of ALD. Below I have copied the text of the submitted abstract (title: "On the history of ALD and the VPHA project"). My goal was to thank all VPHA co-authors (who have left at least one comment in the ALD-history-evolving-file, as of the moment of submission, June 15th) in the acknowledgements. Please check that your name is there; if you notice a name missing let me know, I think I can still update the abstract.

Best regards,

Riikka Puurunen, VPHA coordinator

---

Riikka Puurunen (Dr.), Senior Scientist, Microsystems and Nanoelectronics; Project Manager (IPMA C)

VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, Tietotie 3, Espoo (P.O. Box 1000), FI-02044 Espoo (VTT), Finland

< >, www.vttresearch.com, www.aldcoe.fi

fi.linkedin.com/in/riikkapuurunen, vph-ald.com, aldhistory.blogspot.fi, twitter.com/rlpuu

------- Abstract submitted to BALD 2016 starts --------

On the history of ALD and the VPHA project

Riikka L. Puurunen,¹ Yury Koshtyal,² Henrik Pedersen,³ J. Ruud van Ommen,⁴ Oksana Yurkevich,⁵ Jonas Sundqvist⁶

¹VTT Research Centre of Finland Ltd, Espoo, Finland
² Ioffe Institute, St. Petersburg, Russia
³ Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden
⁴ Delft University of Technology, Delft, the Netherlands
⁵ Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University, Kaliningrad, Russia
⁶ Lund University, Lund, Sweden; and The Fraunhofer IKTS, Dresden, Germany

E-mail: riikka.puurunen@ vtt.fi

Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD), based on the repeated, self-terminating gas—solid reactions of at least two gaseous compounds on a solid substrate, has become a disruptive key enabling materials manufacturing method. By its inventors, this method was given the name Molecular Layering (1960s, Soviet Union) and Atomic Layer Epitaxy (1970s, Finland). While the original names still live on, gradually since the 1990s, "ALD" has evolved to be the mostly commonly used name for the technique. 

Virtual Project on the History of ALD (VPHA) was set up in summer 2013 as an open effort, in which volunteered scientists from all around the world work together in an atmosphere of openness, respect and trust to better understand the early days of ALD ("early" is defined here to end in 1986). VPHA has already resulted in joint publications, a tutorial, two essays, an exhibition, Wikipedia updates, and a blog; see http://vph-ald.com and VPHA publication plan for details.

This presentation at the 14th International Baltic Conference on Atomic Layer Deposition aims to be the last organizational talk of VPHA. The presentation has two goals. First, it will overview of the activities and results of VPHA. Second, it will---on the basis of the new big picture developed in VPHA---summarize the major steps of advancement, which have taken place in the early research and technology of ALD around the world.

Acknowledgement: We are grateful to Tuomo Suntola, Anatoly Malygin and Victor Drozd their general support during the VPHA, to Aziz Abdulagatov and Annina Titoff for help in initiating the VPHA, and to Angel Yanguas-Guil for help with creating and updating ALD-related Wikipedia pages. We kindly thank all participants of VPHA who (as of June 15, 2016) have shared comments in the ALD-history-evolving-file (in alphabetical order): Jaan Aarik, Esko Ahvenniemi, Andrew Akbashev, Saima Ali, Mikhael Bechelany, Maria Berdova, David Cameron, Nikolai Chekurov, Mikhail Chubarov, Véronique Cremers, Victor E. Drozd, Simon D. Elliott, Liliya Elnikova, Gloria Gottardi, Kestutis Grigoras, Dennis Hausmann, Cheol Seong Hwang, Shih-Hui Jen, Marcel Junige, Tanja Kallio, Jaana Kanervo, Ivan Khmelnitskiy, Do Han Kim, Lev Klibanov, Outi Krause, Jakob Kuhs, Irina Kärkkänen, Marja-Leena Kääriäinen, Tommi O. Kääriäinen, Luca Lamagna, Adam Lapicki, Markku Leskelä, Harri Lipsanen, Jussi Lyytinen, Anatolii Malkov, Anatolii Malygin, Christian Militzer, Jyrki Molarius, Małgorzata Norek, Cagla Ozgit-Akgun, Mikhail Panov, Luis Fabián Peña, Fabien Piallat, Georgi Popov, Alexander Pyymaki Perros, Geert Rampelberg, Robin H. A. Ras, Erwan Rauwel, Fred Roozeboom, Timo Sajavaara, Hossein Salami, Hele Savin, Nathanaelle Schneider, Thomas E. Seidel, Pia Sundberg, Dmitry Suyatin, Massimo Tallarida, Tobias Törndahl, Mikko Utriainen, Thomas Waechtler, Claudia Wiemer, and Oili M. E. Ylivaara. RLP acknowledges partial funding from the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Atomic Layer Deposition by the Academy of Finland.

------- Abstract submitted to BALD 2016 ends --------

****************** 

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

VPHA communication: Reminder: VPHA voting DL Jun 15th

The email below was sent to 66 co-authors and 31 prospective co-authors.  

--- 

Dear VPHA co-authors and prospective co-authors,

This is a reminder of the on-going VPHA voting to determine the “conclusive recommended reading list” for VPHA’s ALD 2016 poster.

The more votes we get, the more significant the average result will be. So far, eight people have given their vote in the VPHA-voting-file. If you are one of these eight persons: warmest Thank You for voting!

If you are one of those 58 VPHA co-authors who did not vote yet, please consider giving us your vote. There are still about two days to do that, as the voting deadline is June 15^th.

If you are one of the 31 prospective VPHA co-authors getting this email, you have still two days of time to become a VPHA co-author and then vote J.  

To do the voting, please either (i) enter your vote in the VPHA-voting-ENTRY-sheet and after entering, email info@ vph-ald.com and we will copy-paste your vote to the main voting file, or (ii) fill your vote in the attached xls copy of the ENTRY file and send it back to info@ vph-ald.com, and again we will move the info.  Voting instructions are described in the VPHA-voting-instructions file.  

Best regards,

Grateful for each vote,

Riikka Puurunen, VPHA coordinator

---

Riikka Puurunen (Dr.), Senior Scientist, Microsystems and Nanoelectronics; Project Manager (IPMA C)

VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, Tietotie 3, Espoo (P.O. Box 1000), FI-02044 Espoo (VTT), Finland

< >, www.vttresearch.com, www.aldcoe.fi

fi.linkedin.com/in/riikkapuurunen, vph-ald.com, aldhistory.blogspot.fi, twitter.com/rlpuu

****************** 

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

Overall status (looks good!) + Publications without comments

Yesterday, I browsed through the ALD-history-evolving-file, thinking of which publications to vote in my part for the "conclusive recommended reading list" of early ALD publications. Conclusion: I was very happy with what I saw. The ALD-history-evolving-file, with its >700 personal comments on 360 publications by 66 VPHA volunteers (reading completion: 65.5%), looks really good. Those (crazy) ideas on the basis of which we in summer 2013 initiated the VPHA, have been largely realized. Soon, it will be time to wrap up VPHA. Next steps will be the voting and tentatively a letter/article in the upcoming special ALD issue of JVSTA (see the previous post). New co-authors can still join VPHA and participate as co-authors in these final activities.

Below I have listed the publications which do not have any comments yet as of yesterday. The list included publications in German, English, Finnish, Japanese, Russian. (Russian theses are excluded from the list, as we should get comments on all of those.) I hope that in the next days/weeks, each of these will have at least one comment in the ALD-history-evolving-file.

VPHA communication on voting + JVSTA special issue

The email below discussing VPHA voting and JVSTA 2017 special issue was today sent to 66 VPHA co-authors and 31 prospective co-authors. 

 ---- 

Dear VPHA colleagues,

With this communication, I would like to continue on the topic of voting. The voting has started and the deadline given for finishing, June 15th, is coming close. The partial votes of three persons are already included in the VPHA-voting-file (voting through the VPHA-voting-ENTRY-file).

How to vote? Recently, I got an email from a VPHA participant, asking for advice basically on “How should I vote?” Many are probably thinking of the same. What should one give points to? Thing is: there are no absolute criteria other than described in the VPHA-voting-instructions. Everyone can make their own preferred list of publications, and everyone will have a bit different criteria. Imagine the situation that you have a new colleague who wants to get an understanding of early works on ALD. What original publications would you recommend for him/her to read?

Snapshot of VPHA reading progress - 62% completed

The latest weeks has showed nice increase in the reading progress of Virtual Project on the History of ALD (VPHA). At the moment, 62% of the target reading & commenting is done. In total 66 persons from 18 countries in three continents have participated in the work. More volunteers are still welcome as there is still work to do (38%). For example, there are 29 publications listed without any comments yet.

Hopefully we will get further growth in the comments in the next days, as we have wished to get comments by June 8 for the 2nd round of papers distributed for reading. This will give everyone a week of time to think of their vote for the conclusive recommended reading list of early ALD publications for VPHA's poster presentation at ALD 2016.

Please see below a visual snapshot of the reading progress of VPHA as of June 6, 2016.  Previous similar snapshot was made on May 14th. Comparison of the graphs shows nicely how progress is taking place---thank you to all volunteers who make this happen!

New wikipedia page: V. B. Aleskovskii

A new Wikipedia page has been created for one of the major names of atomic layer deposition (ALD): Valentin Borisovich Aleskovskii. View the page here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentin_Aleskovsky

The page was initiated on June 4 by Angel Yanguas-Gil (view history here) - thank you very much for creating this, Angel! I (Riikka) made next minor edits on the basis of the info from the Molecular Layering essay (DOI: 10.1002/cvde.201402012) by Malygin et al.

Then, something happened which I would call a "Wikipedia miracle". In a day, the article transformed to have much more contents and division into sections, as some to-me-unknown Wikipedia-volunteer from outside the Virtual Project on the History of ALD (VPHA) took action and made major edits, improving the contents of the article and adding links to existing information. The page is still in its early days, and it is interesting to follow, how it will evolve in the future.

In my view, this "Wikipedia miracle", which I have just witnessed to occur, is what Wikipedia is about at its best. Wikipedia is an open encyclopedia. Everyone can create pages and edit contents. With group wisdom, the information evolves and improves. In the Wikipedia workshop of a recent seminar ("Liikutu tiedosta") on Science Communication, research results were presented which concluded the reliability of Wikipedia articles to be on average to a level similar to Encyclopedia Britannica. Year 2016 is the Year of Science in Wikipedia. It would be great, if this year would also motivate ALD scientists to improve the contents of the general ALD page would also be edited to be on the general high level of Wikipedia. For those considering editing, the Five Pillars quickly explain the principles how Wikipedia works:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars.

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

Snapshot of ALD research in Finland - presentations at ALD 2016

The next major international event in the field of atomic layer deposition (ALD) will be the ALD 2016 conference in Ireland in July 2016. To this post, I have collected information on oral presentations from Finland from the conference programme page recently released.

In total, there will be 16 oral presentations from six affiliations in Finland: Aalto University (3), ASM (1), Beneq (1), University of Helsinki (5), University of Jyväskylä (1), and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland (5). Additionally, there will of course be many poster presentations, including the VPHA poster. Oral presentation titles and times are copied below. 

I think that the titles nicely illustrate the multitude of ALD research being made on ALD in Finland, four decades after the first experiments were made by Suntola and co-workers to make ALD (then ALE, Atomic Layer Epitaxy) based thin-film electroluminescent displays (link). 

Those who have interest in ALD in Finland are all welcome to join the Finland ALD group in LinkedIn, where Finland ALD -related news are shared. There are currently 237 members, most of them from Finland and some from abroad. 

VPHA voting open DL Jun 15 - "conclusive reading list of early ALD publications"

Voting is now open to determine the conclusive recommended reading list of early ALD publications, as promised in the abstract of poster presentation of the Virtual Project on the History of ALD (VPHA) at the ALD 2016 Ireland conference.

• All VPHA co-authors can vote (there are now 64 co-authors)
• Everyone is welcome to become a VPHA co-author 

Voting will be made openly with one's own name and is open until June 15th. The organization is made with files that are openly available all the time:

• VPHA-voting-file 
• VPHA-voting-instructions
• VPHA-voting-ENTRY-file (everyone can edit)

More on the topic in the previous VPHA status update. Links to the three files can be found here http://vph-ald.com/VPHAopenfiles.html. Happy voting & see you in Ireland!

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

Photos from HERALD WG2 / ALDCoE Helsinki workshop

We had a very fine HERALD/ALDCoE workshop in Helsinki early this week. About ninety people were present from four continents. Excellent invited talks were delivered e.g. by:

• Prof. Marc Heyns, IMEC, Belgium, 
• Dr. Simon Rushworth, EpiValence, UK
• Dr. Paul Williams, Pegasus Chemicals, UK
• Dr. David C. Smith, LAM Research, USA 
• Prof. Christophe Detavernier, Ghent University, Belgium
• Prof. Anjana Devi, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany
• Prof. Jaan Aarik,  University of Tartu, Estonia
• Prof. Erwin Kessels, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands

Thank you for all invited speakers and participants, as well as the organizers, especially Prof Markku Leskelä, the head of ALDCoE and the chairman of this event, and Dr. Ville Miikkulainen, who is the coordinator or ALDCoE and who was the main practical organizer of the event.

Riikka Puurunen pitching the VPHA organizational poster. Photo by Oili Ylivaara (Twitter via @rlpuu)

Some photos from the event are collected below, published in Twitter by Riikka Puurunen (@rlpuu), Oili Ylivaara (@ltoili), Pegasus Chemicals (@PegasusChemical) and in LinkedIn by Simon Rushworth. A collection of earlier VPHA-related travel reports published in the ALD History Blog can be found here.

New entry {Sayzev1981} in the VPHA overview files

It happened (and it may well happen in the future) that the ALD-history-evolving-file contained an entry which was not included in the VPHA overview files. The entry is:

{Sayzev1981} ger

Katalytische Eigenschaften von Vanadiumoxide-Chromoxid-Aufschicht-Katalysatoren. Untersuchungen an katalytisch aktiven Oberflächenverbindungen.

I have added today this entry today in:

• VPHA-reading-overview-file
• VPHA-voting-file
• VPHA-voting-ENTRY-file

Overall VPHA reading completion today is: 57.85% completed.

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