The Smartphone - Humanity’s Collective Achievement | Gratitude to NTU EEE
I’d always imagined that if there was anything aliens would use to evaluate humanity's progress, it just might be the smartphone and our modern computers! The smartphone (and the internet,) apart from being one of the most sophisticated pieces of technology, represents the collective achievement of decades and generations of work and contributions from various scientists, engineers, businesspersons, etc., from around the world to have made it all possible. Something never achieved before in history at such a scale!
This newfound appreciation comes from the in-depth knowledge gained from my undergraduate degree at the NTU School of Electrical & Electronic Engineering in Nanyang Technological University Singapore, and all the opportunities that it connected me to that I am immensely grateful for. Through various experiences I learnt about all the technologies and industries that go into making smartphones and electronics – all the way from the atomic level, to circuit design and fabrication technologies, to the broad scale communication and power technologies, and more.
The specific opportunities that I am grateful for, from EEE and NTU are:
The option to take postgraduate courses as final year electives even as an undergraduate! In my final year, studying alongside Masters and PhD students, I took 3 courses: IC Packaging, Advanced Wafer Processing, and Smart Biosensors, and managed to achieve top grades.
Credibility and Reputation. The reputation of NTU EEE’s coursework and NTU OEP’s (overseas internship program) network helped me secure an internship all the way in the Silicon Valley of USA in California, where I moved and worked fulltime there for 6 months at a foundry startup. Additionally, Zhejiang University waived the tuition fees for their summer school for NTU students – and I got a 2 week trip to a PhD research conference in China along with company and museum visits.
Many companies often visit EEE and provide tours – I visited semiconductor foundries in Singapore – NTU’s own cleanroom, Institute of Microelectronics, and also visits to foundries in China (through Zhejiang University.)
Undergraduate Research – I had the opportunity to perform hands-on experiments in a state-of-the-art laser photonics lab and work alongside PhD students on a novel quantum photonic semiconductor device.
Through electives in Quantum Mechanics from the Physics department, I deepened my understanding at the atomic level. These courses combined with visualizations from great YouTube channels such as Lesics, BranchEducation and BenEater helped me put together all the pieces of the puzzle of modern computers.
Invitations to conferences (fee waived.)
There were many more opportunities and resources, all of which I am grateful for, e.g. a lecture from an invited researcher on the growing e-waste problem, and a talk by Vitalik Buterin (the founder of Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrency) who visited NTU.
Some other takeaways:
Through the IC packaging course, I learnt that any improvements from shrinking electronics is only as reliable as the packaging that it will later be shipped out in! Increasingly packaging is becoming a bottleneck. Thermal reliability is an increasingly important topic – all devices are bound to fail! Increased temperature (global warming) worsens lifetime. Implications are blackouts, phones and computers dying earlier, servers going off (and thus websites and services not working), and more.
In Advanced Wafer Processing, I learnt in-depth about all the processes that go into semiconductor chip fabrication. A takeaway I wish to talk on, is the huge amount of water consumed by semiconductor foundries! De-ionized water is needed at every stage (one wafer goes through 100s of stages) of the process, and it takes 8 gallons of regular water to produce 1 gallon of de-ionized water. Towards any semiconductor developments, for e.g. in India, a critical first step is improving the ground infrastructure, namely the need for uninterrupted electricity and huge amounts of water.
Through the various people I have met, through the various courses taken, talks attended, through the many companies I visited and through the various museums (technological) I have been too, I have learnt a lot about the industry from various different perspectives, the contributions from many different people in history, and the immense scale of the industries and economies that have made all the technologies that we have today possible. I look forward to making my contributions to this industry.
