Re: Fga2 Furnace Abuse

Dear labmembers --

This is your worst lab nightmare. You've just spent a week working on
these wafers and they've just been damaged. It's bad enough when it an
equipment problem. But it's much worse when an unknown person does it.
Jiale's process has a limited thermal budget and because she doesn't
know the thermal history now, she has to start over.

It seems that it's a habit among some fga2 users to enter recipes and
load wafers before even enabling on Coral. Certainly, if this person
had tried to enable on Coral, they would have seen that Jiale had it
enabled and reserved. Another and bigger mistake was that this person
has not gotten back to Jiale about this.

So first, a reminder to all: USE Coral PROPERLY! If you are preparing
a machine or loading wafers so that no one else can use it, should be
enabled by you on Coral BEFORE you begin. You should check the status
on Coral and respect reservations. This goes for any tool.

Second, another reminder: MISTAKES HAPPEN AND IT'S OK! This is a
learning institution so mistakes happen all the time. But we need to be
responsible adults and own up to them. Jiale would appreciate an
apology. She would really appreciate information which might help her
to salvage her wafers -- and if not, perhaps a hand in reprocessing
them. When any of us makes a mistake, we should try learn from it.

So if anyone has any information that might help, please get in touch.
Please also take this as a reminder to use Coral properly and remind
others to do so.

Thank you for your attention --

Your SNF staff

Jiale Liang wrote:
> Hi, Professor Howe, Professor Wong, Mary, and Nancy.
>
> I enabled my fga2 around 15:30pm and I have reserved the tool for a long time annealling till next day. I adjusted my temperature to 400C, put my wafer into the furnace and left SNF around 17:30. However, when I came back 2 hours after, I was surprised to see the door of the furnace is fully open, the quartz cap is put on the desk beside and the temperature shows only 267C.
>
> Everyone knows the fga2 is a manual-controlled furnace and the wafers can be directly seen through the door. It is hard to believe someone opened the door, pulled out the quartz cap and adjusted the temperature setting UNINTENTIONALLY. Even if the labmember opened the furnace by mistake without checking the Coral first, they should not leave the quartz tube uncapped, the door open, and the temperature adjusted. Since I came with the furnace fully open without any message left around the tool, it makes me feel extremely unsafe in this lab and cannot trust my samples any more. The failure of this step ruins all my previous work and costs me tens of hours to start again. I hope people can respect others' work and instrument reservation.
>
> Please let me know who operated that furnace during that period. I will really appreciate that.
>
> Best,
>
> Jiale
>