I am a Chemical Engineer

[Calvin Pham]

This is why I study chemical engineering at UCLA. Ever since I was a child, my mind would ponder how things worked and I constantly loved to build things. Fast forward to my fifth year here at UCLA and my future will consist not only of finding out how things work but of studying how to make things better. My major here is Chemical Engineering with an emphasis in Semiconductor Manufacturing. The future is exciting to me because engineers making further advances in technology will make science fiction become science fact and I want to be one of those people making those advances.Making a semiconductor chip is incredibly complex and it requires an incredible amount of precision and control. A Chemical Engineer's job in a semiconductor fabrication facility is to manage the chemical processes that go into making an integrated circuit. An example of an integrated circuit is the microprocessor in all of today's computers, and each step in making this device is a type of chemical reaction or chemical process in which materials are layered onto or removed from a silicon wafer. While the average person might not find this very interesting, I want to be one of those people who help mankind move forward technologically. The first microprocessor built by Intel in 1971 had a so-called feature size, the size of the smallest object on the chip, of approximately 10 microns. That is 10 × 10-6 meters or about ten times smaller than the width of a human hair. Today, the feature size in Intel's top of the line chip is 45 nanometers, 45 × 10-9 meters or over 1500 times smaller than the width of a human hair. This is so incomprehensibly small and yet we are able to create a working chip with those dimensions. Incredible.My motivations for studying at UCLA are so that I can be a part of this ongoing technological revolution and contribute to the already amazing advances that we have made as humans.