Nanoscale Education for Semiconductor Design

Walid Ibrahim and Yacine Atif

College of Information Technology, UAE University, Al Ain, U.A.E.

Keywords:

Nanotechnology, Learning Processes, Learning Objects, Curriculum Design, Nanofabrication, Bottom-up,

Top-down.

Abstract:

Over the last decades, nanotechnology had established itself as the upcoming revolution in science and tech-

nology. The ability of manipulating material at the atomic and molecular levels allowed nanotechnology to

open an entirely new paradigm of devices and products. In the semiconductor industry several new nanode-

vices have been proposed to replace the classical CMOS devices that have been used over the last four decades.

These new nanodevices have shown signiﬁcant potential to overcome the fundamental limits of current CMOS

devices. However, limited educational resources and processes are available to prepare future nanotechnology

engineers and scientists to integrate these promising nanodevices into the main semiconductor manufacturing

streams. This paper proposes new learning structures and processes to propagate nanotechnology learning

resources over the pervasive Web. The proposed approach is illustrated by a case study centered around the

manufacturing of future nanodevices. We adopt standard structures and processes to organize and navigate

through digital instructional contents, such as IEEE LOM and IMS LD. In doing so, we aim at streamlining

the propagation of reusable repositories across the open Web to facilitate the integration of nanotechnology

learning resources into the rising social trend of massively open online courses (or MOOCs).

1 INTRODUCTION

Nanotechnology was formally deﬁned in the 1999

NSF workshop report as “the ability to control and re-

structure the matter at the atomic and molecular levels

in the range of approximately 1–100 nm, and exploit-

ing the distinct properties and phenomena at that scale

as compared to those associated with single atoms or

molecules or bulk behavior. The aim is to create ma-

terials, devices, and systems with fundamentally new

properties and functions by engineering their small

structure” (Roco et al., 2000). In 2001 Uddin and

Chowdhury (Uddin and Chowdhury, 2001) stated that

the fundamental objective of nanotechnology is to

model, simulate, design and manufacture nanostruc-

tures and nanodevices with extraordinary properties

and assemble them economically into a working sys-

tem with revolutionary functional capabilities.

Applications in a wide spectrum of areas ranging

from nanomaterials to industry-speciﬁc applications

in biotechnology, electronics and energy, are creat-

ing unique opportunities all over the World. With

the latest advancement in nanolithography and opti-

cal proximity correction, the semiconductor industry

was successfully able to scale the transistor size fur-

ther to 20nm. This deep scaling into the nanometer

range has enabled several new mobile and commu-

nication applications including wearable computers,

intelligent handheld devices, healthcare implantable

devices , and self-powered wireless sensor networks

to mention a few. Today, there are more than 1,300

consumer products containing nanotechnology com-

ponents, while the inventory of products has grown

by over 500% in the last ﬁve years (Rodgers et al.,

2013). Trends suggest that by 2020 there will be a 3

trillion dollar market with 6 million employees in this

ﬁeld (Roco, 2011).

In order to sustain this successful trend, it is essen-

tial to have sufﬁcient workforce with an intensive and

focused training in nanotechnology. Unfortunately,

because of the interdisciplinary nature of the nan-

otechnology ﬁeld (Porter and Youtie, 2009), this kind

of workforce is hard to develop. A skilled nanotech-

nology specialist should have good understanding of

several other science and engineering ﬁelds includ-

ing math, material and biomedical sciences, chem-

istry, physics, computer and environmental sciences,

among others. Currently, due to the lack of a proper

nanotechnology education, nanotechnology nspecial-

ists develop the required knowledge through training

courses and on the job learning experience.

Nanotechnology is rapidly growing as a separate

520

Ibrahim W. and Atif Y..

Nanoscale Education for Semiconductor Design.

DOI: 10.5220/0004956705200525

In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2014), pages 520-525

ISBN: 978-989-758-020-8

 2014 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

discipline by itself (McNally, 2013). However, one

major challenge asscoiated with the growth of this

discipline is the substantial cost required to provide

laboratory experiences. These hands-on practices are

essential to experience nanoscale matter (atoms and

molecules), and to design nanodevices and systems.

The associated cost can be reduced signiﬁcantly by

relying on reusable electronic simulations and Web-

based repository of concept resources.

Another typical aspect in nanotechnology educa-

tion, which is not well supported in existing digital

instructional approaches, is the “zoom” effect, which

hierarchically and gradually reveals the inﬁnitesimal

structures of nanomaterial. An alternative “assembly”

effect could empower existing digital instruction to

get learners exposed to both bottom-up and top-down

approaches of nanostructures manufacturing. In this

paper, we propose to augment existing learning tech-

nology standards for supportingthe design and the de-

velopment of virtual learning environments.

We adopt standard structures to organize digital

instructional contents and processes, such as IEEE

LOM (Atif et al., 2003) and IMS SCORM (Hsu et al.,

2010). In doing so, we aim at streamlining the prop-

agation of reusable repositories across the open Web

to facilitate the integration of nanotechnology learn-

ing resources into the rising social trend of Massively

Open Online Courses (or MOOCs) (Zhang, 2013).

2 BACKGROUND AND RELATED

WORKS

There are several challenges facing the integration of

nanotechnology into the mainstream of undergradu-

ate engineering curriculum. First, it is important to

increase the awareness of high school and the ﬁrst

year engineering students about how the nanotech-

nology will shape our future. To this extend, Jones

et al. (Jones et al., 2003) investigated the feasibility

of allowing students in high school classrooms to con-

duct nanotechnology experiments through controlling

remotely scientiﬁc equipments over the Web. Stu-

dents had access to the nanoManipulator tool which

gave them the ability to control an atomic force mi-

croscope over the Internet. The authors believe that

most students were excited about the experience and

developed more accurate concepts regarding nanome-

ter scale as well as 2D and 3D virus morphology.

Another study funded by NSF focused on in-

creasing the nanotechnology awareness for both high

school and ﬁrst year engineering students (Rodgers

et al., 2013)showed that student had difﬁculties

deﬁning nanotechnology and its scale. This study

also highlighted computer graphics, visualized siz-

ing charts, and educational videos as effective tech-

niques for helping students understand nanotechnol-

ogy. Moreover,the study showed that connectingnan-

otechnology to various science and engineering ﬁelds

could serve as a catalyst method for introducing and

increasing students’ awareness and understanding of

nanotechnology scope.

To reduce the anticipated lab cost, (Sarangan et al.,

2013) suggested the use of a computer based nanofab

trainer. The proposed trainer would allow students

to practice real-life processes and tools as opposed to

normal simulators used for predicting physical phe-

nomena. They also proposed a multimedia system

to bring live interactive demonstrations from exist-

ing nanotechnology laboratories and cleanrooms to

the classrooms. Molecular Workbench software is an-

other tool proposed by Xie and Lee (Xie and Lee,

2012) for teaching nanotechnology concepts. The

tool provides a virtual laboratory in which simulated

nanoscale processes can be examined and manipu-

lated on a computer screen in real time. The au-

thors conducted a pilot study iwhich showed that

simulation-based experimentations can be success-

fully used for undergraduate students to develop an

integrated understanding of concepts in nanotechnol-

ogy at their own pace.

At the same time there are some efforts to incorpo-

rate nanotechnology into the mainstream of an under-

graduate engineering curriculum. Uddin and Chowd-

hury (Uddin and Chowdhury, 2001) proposed the con-

tent of three fundamental courses to be integrated into

an undergraduate engineering curriculum and sug-

gested that the concepts of nanotechnology should be

introduced during freshman and sophomore engineer-

ing courses. They also suggested modifying the out-

comes of junior and senior design courses to include

the modeling, simulation, control and optimization of

nanodevices and systems.

However, the common factor in the above instruc-

tional design approaches is the lack of a standard plat-

form for Web based education to create a space for

educators to share experiences and to reach a wide

community of learners.

Electronic learning production is multilayered as

shown in Figure 1. The core layer is the learning

object, which subsumes learning items following a

standard vocabulary deﬁned by IEEE LOM speciﬁ-

cation. Each item, in turn, points to a resource in

the resources layer. As illustrated in Figure 1, some

resources may reference ﬁles or contents outside the

packaged contents through a URL.

Learning objects metadata is a standard structure

to describe educational objects. The IEEE LOM stan-

NanoscaleEducationforSemiconductorDesign

521

Figure 1: Learning Resource Layers.

dard speciﬁes the vocabulary required to describe a

learning object, so it can be used, re-used or refer-

enced in technology supported learning. Learning ob-

jects typically incorporate contents to aid learners and

education-providers carry out their activities. This

content can be in a variety of electronic formats, in-

cluding (X)HTML, RTF, PDF, or simply a URL. A

learning object may be delivered within a speciﬁc en-

vironment such as a simulated laboratory application.

Finally, a learning design may dictate the navigation

through a sequence of learning objects. This process

obeys a standard speciﬁcation labeled IMS-LD (IMS

Learning Design), which we will further present as

part of our proposed framework later in this paper.

A learning object structure includes typical cate-

gories following an XML-based speciﬁcation of LOM

standard. This structure recognizes domain-speciﬁc

requirements, which include a set of functional and

non-functional capabilities that are deemed common

to learner-assistant software agents. A LOM struc-

ture consists of the following elements which we used

in our speciﬁcations: general, lifecycle,

Technical,

Educational, Rights, Relations

. We particu-

larly focus on extending the

Relation

attribute to

mimic advocated pedagogical processes in nanoscale

education.

3 LEARNING DESIGN FOR

NANOSCALE EDUCATION

Current LOM metadata information need to be re-

purposed to explicitly represent the speciﬁcation of

nanoscale instructional units. This form of instruc-

tional units relies on semantic relationships between

learning resources to introduce learners to nanoma-

terials (Manning and Monetti, 2013). Semiconductor

design could involve bottom-up or top-downnanofab-

Table 1: Relationships in Nano-Learning Objects.

Relationship LOM element

Association Requires

Aggregation isBasedOn

Generalization hasPart

rication processes, using clusters of nanomaterial el-

ements. This approach to the pyramid of educa-

tion allows learners to advance through various disci-

plines that focus on phenomena and methods related

to length scales (Roco, 2003). The objective is to pro-

vide a progressively comprehensive nanoscale educa-

tion with connected and integrated knowledge to pro-

vide a holistic view, and a deductive understanding to

learners.

Learning resources in nanoscale education, are

structured as nano-learning objects, which describe

structural relationships of learning content in or-

der to support association and aggregation connec-

tions . These relationships could make use of

the

Relation->Kind

element of LOM attributes, as

shown in Table 1.

We deﬁne three types of relationships. The as-

sociation relationship guides learners to prerequisite

knowledge, whereas the aggregation relationship de-

ﬁnes “the degree to which a digital learning resource

is made up of other digital learning resources” (Na-

tional Science Foundation, 2004). Finally, the gener-

alization relationship refers to content assets or sub-

topics.

Collections of learning objects can be further or-

ganized and sequenced to form a learning compo-

nent, which refers to a lesson or a course. Sequencing

learning objects could be modeled through the use of

a learning design language, such as the IMS-LD (for

Learning Design), developed by IMS in 2003 (Koper

et al., 2003). The conceptual structure of learning de-

sign is based on a set of concepts or building blocks

that support the interaction among roles, activities and

environments. In the case of the IMS-LD, each per-

son may be assigned a role (either a learner or staff).

Based on the assigned role and the speciﬁed learn-

ing goal, each person performs an activity within a

speciﬁc environment. This could be for example a

particular experiment in a simulated laboratory envi-

ronment. The activity may involve both the learner

and a remote laboratorystaff. Our proposedhierarchi-

cal learning processes are based on IMS-LD standard,

which sequences learning objects using the aggrega-

tion or generalization links for bottom-up or top-down

learning designs. Each learning object may further be

explored through association links.

Teachers and instruction designers need a speciﬁ-

cation of nanoscale education to express related learn-

CSEDU2014-6thInternationalConferenceonComputerSupportedEducation

522

ing activities. An IMS-LD compliant speciﬁcation

lends itself to be used by existing graphical authoring

tools and engines to play the resulting speciﬁcations

(Grifﬁths et al., 2008; McAndrew et al., 2005). To fa-

cilitate nanoscale learning developments, we propose

ready-made templates that can be further reﬁned to

create ﬁnished modules (called learning units). These

templates guide instructors and content providers to

build structured learning contents. We call these tem-

plates Nanoscale Learning Design Patterns (NLDPs).

They are analogous to Web page templates (e.g. avail-

able in Microsoft Front Page) to produce ﬁnished Web

pages as content and structure are separated. Figure 2

illustrates this IMS-LD based learning design pattern

for our nanoscale education model. NLDPs could be

implemented using an appropriate editor. The pro-

vision of a dedicated high-level nanoscale learning

editor supports teachers in the process of creating

nanoscale learning units by starting from existing pat-

terns.

The successive levels in the proposed learning de-

sign reﬂect the progressive bottom-up or top-down

content coverage. Each levels is supported by a set

of activities, which involve either learner or supervis-

ing staff. The environment entity indicates the exper-

imental setup to carry out those activities, such as a

simulated laboratory as discussed earlier in Figure 1.

4 SEMICONDUCTOR DESIGN

INSTRUCTION

College students should get ﬁrst-hand experience on

how to fabricate various types of nanodevices and

how to use them to design functional nanosystems.

Therefore In additional to the classical CMOS pro-

cesses, the proposed cyber-infrastructure containers

should include learning objects with resources to in-

troduce learners to carbon nano tubes (CNTs) and

their unique properties such as their extraordinary

strength and thermal conductivity. This learning ob-

ject also includes resources to explore the electrical

properties of CNTs and their usage as ﬁeld effect tran-

sistors (CNTFET). Another learning object embeds

motivational resources on the latest developments in

semiconductor nanowires and their vast applications

as logic devices, photo-detectors, biomedical sensors,

thermoelectric generators, and memory devices. Sub-

sequent (optional) learning objects could be used to

introduce students to other types of nanodevices such

as molecular resonant tunneling devices , single elec-

tron transistors , quantum-dot cellular automata de-

vices, or any other future nanodevicesas they become

more developed and practical. These learning objects

form the electronic repository of resources which is

structured following the framework presented in Fig-

ure 1.

The cognitive navigational process through learn-

ing objects and their underlying instructional environ-

ments follows the methods used to fabricate the above

mentioned nanodevices. These methods and hence

the proposed learning path could hierarchically fol-

low bottom-up or top-down approaches. Bottom-up

methods are those where the nanodevices are gradu-

ally assembled starting from the atom and the molec-

ular levels in an additive fashion until the desired de-

vice is built. On the other hand, the top-down meth-

ods start from a bulk substrate and use imaging and

etching processes to sculpt the device.

The top-down method relies on using several pho-

tolithography phases to engrave devices on a substrate

and connect them together to realize a speciﬁc circuit

design. Each photolithography phase usually con-

sists of several steps , which we put together using

“

hasPart

” attribute (see Table 1) of LOM’s relation

tag.

The photolithography process is very mature as

it has been successfully used by the semiconduc-

tor industry since 1970s. However the resolution

of the photolithography process is limited by the

wavelength of the light source used in the process.

Current photolithography process uses deep ultravi-

olet 193 nm laser and liquid immersion techniques

along with optical proximity correction to achieve

feature length less than 20nm. In order to use the

lithography method for future nanodevices, novel

processes are needed to reduce the resolution fur-

ther to few nanometers. Hence, in addition to the

classical photolithography, additional learning ob-

jects could include scanning, scanning probe, e-beam,

soft, nanoprint, nanosphere, and colloidal lithography

techniques.

As a result of the massive government and in-

dustry investments in nanofabrication research, sev-

eral bottom-up fabrication processes have matured

over the last decade. This suggests an alternative

navigation approach of learning objects with relation

tag value set to “

isBasedOn

” to aggregate compos-

ing learning objects together. These processes and

hence the induced instructional navigation can be di-

vided into chemical synthesis and self-assembly ones.

Self-assembly processes aggregate learning objects

about molecular self-assembly and DNA-scaffolding

processes. The chemical synthesis processes, on the

other hand, aggregate learning objects on gas-phase

and liquid-phase resources to manufacture nanopar-

ticles. The gas-phase subgroup may further aggre-

gate learning objects that illustrate the details of

NanoscaleEducationforSemiconductorDesign

523

Figure 2: Nanoscale Learning Design.

atomic layer deposition , physical vapor deposition ,

and chemical vapor deposition processes. Similarly,

Sol–gel , and liquid-phase epitaxy learning objects

could be included under the liquid-phase subgroup.

It is obvious that the proposed learning objects

mentioned above are highly interdisciplinary. The ed-

ucational material covers a wide range of topics in-

cluding engineering, chemistry, physics, material sci-

ence, and biology in case of molecular self-assembly

and DNA-scaffolding. Having these learning ob-

jects correlated in a bottom-up and top-down ap-

proaches following the navigational structure shown

in Figure 2 organizes the contributions from instruc-

tors and scientists across multiple disciplines. The

open Web design structure offers also interaction op-

portunities and best practice sharing of instructional

scenarios among instructors Worldwide. Figure 3

shows the hierarchy of nanofabrication learning ob-

jects and their navigational sequence across the pro-

posed cyber-infrastructure design container discussed

earlier in Section 3.

Figure 3: Nanofabrication unites proposed for inclusion in

the cyber-infrastructure containers.

In addition to the top-down and bottom-up pro-

cesses, there are also few other processes such as

block copolymer lithography (Bates et al., 2013)that

combines the bottom-up self-assembly process with

top-down lithographic one, which calls for further

customization of the learning design structure shown

in Figure 2.

5 CONCLUSION

In view of the current shortage in nanotechnology ed-

ucational resources, we proposed standard Web-based

structures and processes for instructors to share edu-

cational material and for learners to personalize their

learning experience in nanotechnology. The novel

learning structure extends the current LOM metadata

to explicitly represent the speciﬁcations of nanoscale

instructional units based on expanding the standard

Relation

tag of LOM standard with three attributes:

Requires

isBasedOn

and

hasPart

. Following this

design structure, we also adopted standard learn-

ing processes based on IMS-LD information model,

that we speciﬁcally tailored to accommodate the pro-

cesses of navigating through nanotechnology instruc-

tional material. To illustrate our approaches, we pro-

posed a semiconductor design case study which we

mapped on the proposed learning structure and pro-

cesses to assist instructors sharing and reusing learn-

ing resources via the pervasive Web. The aim is to fa-

cilitate the integration of nanotechnology learning re-

sources into the rising social trend of massively open

online courses (or MOOCs) to beneﬁt a larger com-

munity of learners and thus advancing the future of

nanoscale developments.

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524

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