The ECS Journal of Solid State Science and Technology (JSS) is one of the newest peer-reviewed journals from ECS launched in 2012.

Atomic Layer Etch (ALEt) and Atomic Layer Clean (ALC) are emerging as enabling technologies for sub 10nm technology nodes. At these scales performance will be extremely sensitive to process variation.

Atomic layer processes are the most promising path to deliver the precision needed. However, many areas of ALEt and ALC are in need of improved fundamental understanding and process development. This focus issue will cover state-of-the-art efforts that address a variety of approaches to ALE and ALC.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Surface reaction chemistry and its impact on selectivity
• Plasma ion energy distribution and control methods
• Novel plasma sources and potential application to ALEt & ALC
• Innovative approaches to atomic layer material removal
• Novel device applications of ALEt & ALC
• Process chamber design considerations
• Advanced delivery of chemicals to processing chambers
• Metrology and control of ALEt & ALC
• Device performance impact
• Synthesis of new chemistries for ALEt & ALC application
• Damage free surface defect removal
• Process and discharge modeling

Find out more.

Co-editor of Interface, Vijay Ramani, talks about open access publishing in this letter from the editor.

The following is an article from the latest issue of Interface by co-editor Vijay Ramani.

Late last year, I accepted the invitation to become co-editor of Interface safe in the knowledge that I would not actually be called upon to do anything for the foreseeable future.* Thanks to the outstanding ECS staff and conscientious guest editors and authors, this happy state of affairs has persisted until now. But just as “even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea,” so it is that the inevitable passage of time has brought upon a situation wherein actual effort is required on my part, viz. this editorial. The increasingly plaintive entreaties from our admirably patient Director of Publications seeking the contents of this column can no longer, in good conscience, be ignored or fobbed off with feeble excuses.

Read the rest.

Plan now to participate at CSTIC 2015, one of the largest and the most comprehensive annual semiconductor technology conferences in China.

We invite you to submit your papers now for the China Semiconductor Technology International Conference 2015, one of the largest and the most comprehensive annual semiconductor technology conferences in China. CSTIC is organized by SEMI and IEEE, co-organized by China’s High-Tech Expert Committee (CHTEC). It is co-sponsored by ECS, MRS and China Electronics Materials Industry Association. CSTIC 2015 will be held on March 15-16, 2015 at the SHICC, Shanghai, China, in conjunction with SEMICON China 2015. It will cover all the aspects of semiconductor technology and manufacturing, including devices, design, lithography, integration, materials, processes, manufacturing as well as emerging semiconductor technologies and silicon material applications. Hot topics, such as 3D integration, III-V semiconductors, carbon nanoelectronics, LEDs, and MEMS. And CPTIC 2015 has joined CSTIC 2015 as Symposium XII : Si Materials and Photovoltaic Technology.

We are soliciting papers from authors around the world on all aspects of semiconductor and photovoltaic technology and manufacturing, including semiconductor design, Frond-End-of-Line (FEOL), Back-End-of-Line (BEOL), packaging, testing, as well as emerging semiconductor technologies; photovoltaic market, policy, power grid, device, design, process, tooling, materials, and fundamental study between China and the rest of the world with a focus on industrial applications.

Submit your abstract online.

The 227th ECS Meeting is in Chicago, IL from May 24 – 28, 2015

The call for abstracts for the 227th ECS Meeting to be held May 24-28, 2015 in Chicago, IL is now open.

Meeting abstracts should explicitly state objectives, new results, and conclusions or significance of the work.

Regardless of whether you submit as a poster or an
oral presentation, it is at the symposium organizers’ discretion whether it is scheduled for an oral or poster presentation.

Programming for this meeting will occur in January 2015.

Abstracts are due no later than November 14, 2014.

Find out more.

“Google Science” would launch a number of journals, be “self-organising” and yet have a team of “qualified reviewers.”

There is a Google Scholar, but what if there was a Google Science? The UK edition of Wired magazine is tracking the mystery of whether it is or is not in the mix in How ‘Google Science’ could transform academic publishing.

“Google Science” would launch a number of journals, be “self-organising” and yet have a team of “qualified reviewers”.

“99.9 percent of the work, including peer review would be done by the scientific community,”

This is, of course, about open access an issue we at ECS are committed to. There’s a great discussion on this. The article says:

“Most [academics] don’t particularly care about open access, in part because they are not incentivised to do so. This is changing, but only slowly, and right now most still care more about publishing in established, high-profile journals and in gaining a lot of citations.”

Google could change the game, if they really were going to get involved. Spoiler alert: Wired found no evidence a Google Science was in the works.

Find out more about ECS open access.

This focus issue will cover state-of-the-art efforts that address a variety of approaches to printable functional materials and devices.

Printing technologies in an atmospheric environment offer the potential for low-cost and materials-efficient alternatives for manufacturing electronics and energy devices such as luminescent displays, thin film transistors, sensors, thin film photovoltaics, fuel cells, capacitors, and batteries.

Significant progress has been made in the area of printable functional organic and inorganic materials including conductors, semiconductors, dielectric, and luminescent materials

These will enable exciting advances in printed electronics and energy devices. Some examples are printed amorphous oxide semiconductors, organic conductors and semiconductors, inorganic semiconductor nanomaterials, silicon, chalcogenide semiconductors, ceramics, metals, intercalation compounds, and carbon-based materials.

This focus issue will cover state-of-the-art efforts that address a variety of approaches to printable functional materials and device. The focus issue will include both invited and contributed papers reflecting recent achievements. Prospective authors are encouraged to submit contributions reporting the original research results or reviewing key emerging trends in printable functional materials and devices for publication in this focus issue.

Find out more.

ORCID is unique in its ability to reach across disciplines, research sectors, and national boundaries and its cooperation with other identifier systems.

ECS is pleased to announce that it recently became a member of the Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) registry. ORCID is an open, non-profit, community-based effort founded by academic institutions, professional bodies, funding agencies, and publishers to create and maintain a registry of unique researcher identifiers intended to remedy the systemic name ambiguity problem seen in scholarly research. ORCID resolves the confusion brought about by name changes, the cultural differences in name order presentation, and the inconsistent use of first-name and middle-name abbreviations on published research papers.

(more…)

We have been beating the drum about open access here at ECS for some time. This taken from Interface magazine over one year ago:

Commercial publishers have learned that the subscription-based model could be played to their enormous benefit, placing a further cost on the scholarly publishing system. There has been a proliferation of new journals being added to subscription packages, burdening library budgets with additional journals and without providing reciprocal scientific value. This has been coupled with the excessively high prices being charged by many scientific publishers for the dissemination of technical knowledge, and collectively the money now being extracted from the process is stifling scientific advancement. (Read the rest.)

(We noted when Tesla was getting it right, too.)

(more…)

This is from ECS President Paul A. Kohl.

One of the joys of being President of ECS is contacting ECS contributors about good news. I am especially excited about ECS journals and the direction they are taking. I believe they are the quite simply The Best Place to publish electrochemical and solid state papers – especially now they are also enabling Open Access (OA). In short, ECS journals (JES, JSS, EEL, SSL) are:

• well-established–we have been publishing since 1902
• high quality–our peer-review is excellent and we publish one of the most-cited journals
• fast–submission to first decision regularly takes less than a month; and once the paper is accepted it usually takes ten days or fewer for the Version of Record to be published online–faster than any other journal in our field
• open access–authors now have the choice of publishing as Open Access, which enables the widest possible distribution because there is no subscription or barrier for readers to access your paper
• FREE open access for many of our authors: publishing OA is free to ECS members, ECS meeting attendees, and authors coming from subscribing institutions

No other journal offers this combination of quality, speed, and full open access at no cost to the author.

By publishing your research in our highly respected journals–and choosing to make your papers Open Access–you’re helping us make OA widespread and sharing the outputs of your important research with scientists around the world. I did (see my latest article) and will be doing so in the future.

Yours,

Paul

Paul A. Kohl
ECS President

PS: Find out how to publish your manuscript.

Luckily someone is saving everything.

Zoltan Nagy calls himself a semi-retired electrochemist, but he’s doing anything but being retired. After 15 years in a variety of electrochemical industrial research, he spent 30 years at Argonne National Laboratory carrying out research on electrode kinetics and surface electrochemistry. Now he’s at the Chemistry Department of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

He wrote to ask that we let people know the two rather popular and often visited websites:  ‘Electrochemistry  Dictionary and Encyclopedia ” and “Electrochemical Science and Technology Information Resource (ESTIR)” which were hosted by the Yeager Center at Case-Western Reserve University went off-line in January because their  computer died, and it could not be restarted there because of some new university regulations.

Work is on the way to relocate these websites to a new host, hopefully in the not too distant future.

You can have a look at what they used to be on what’s called the WayBackMachine (check out any old versions of websites BTW). Once you get there paste in electrochem.cwru.edu/encycl/ and click on January 1, 2014. Then try http://electrochem.cwru.edu/estir/ and select February 3, 2013.

It’s a gold mine of electrochemical information.