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Wafer Power: Building Circuits

From Sand to Semiconductors

In one of the world's cleanest environments -- scientists and engineers at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Mass. turn sand into tomorrow's semiconductors.

It's an amazing process that takes silicon crystals, called boules, slices them into thin wafers and then builds millions of circuits -- that can run everything from computers to cell phones.

Engineer Jeremy Muldavin and his team also create even smaller components on these wafers -- called microelectromechanical systems or MEMS. MEMS move and they can sense things. So if semiconductors are the brains in a system - then MEMS are the hands and the eyes.

CONCEPTS EXPLORED
Clean Rooms
Building Semiconductor Wafers
MEMs (microelectromechanical systems)
RELATED LINKS
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MILITARY BRANCH
Dept. of Defense

LAB'S NDEP PAGE
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About this Webisode
Welcome to LAB TV. We have 2 seasons of Webisodes. There are new episodes each week that demonstrate the amazing research that is everyday work at DoD labs.
Season TwoSeason One
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