Whirling in Orbit

Traditionally, the etching of silicon wafers is a guess and check process- the manufactures guess the depth of the features for a given design, produce the wafer, and check if the process was successful. This process of nanomanufacturing is wasteful. When using a deep reactive ion etching (DRIE) process to etch features on to silicon wafers, the depth of each feature depends on at least six parameters, including the number of features, the density of features, the exposure time, position of each feature, arrangement of features, and feature size. Using experimental data, the feature depths can be modeled on these six parameters and this would allow manufacturers to simulate the actual outcome of their wafer features without waste. In this lesson students will be mimicking the computational modeling process used by career researchers to model the force needed to maintain an object’s constant circular motion based on three parameters.