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Editor's Notes

• #4: I went to the University of Maryland, College Park, where I majored as a EE. Now, electrical engineering is a large umbrella that covers topics as diverse as computer science and power stations. I concentrated in optics. My first job was on-campus working with a professor at the Institute of Physical Sciences. This was a Ti:Sapphire laser lab, as the topic of ultra-short pulse lasers that could achieve a “terawatt on a table-top” was a very popular problem in the late ‘90’s. I worked closely with his graduate students. I was the one who crawled under the table to drag out the vacuum pump when it stopped working. I worked in the metal shop to make the various clamps and things they needed to do their experiments.
• #5: It was through those connections that I was able to get the job at Los Alamos working in a laser lab there. It was a great experience as I was able to conduct experiments even though I was only an undergrad at the time.
• #6: I came back to finish school and I had taken all these optics courses, but at the same time I was fascinated by micro-technology and had the opportunity to take a microfab course during which we actually built transistors on a silicon wafer. For my senior thesis I needed a topic, and I thought, “why not combine these two things, and write about micro-optics”. So that’s what I did, and during an internet search I typed in “optical mems” and up popped the website for MEMS Optical. So here was this group of guys down in Huntsville, Alabama, who were doing exactly what I wanted to do. I called them up and asked if they had any openings, and they said, “As a matter of fact, we do.” So that’s how I got the job at MEMS Optical, and came to be doing micro-optics down in Huntsville, Alabama.
• #7: I moved down there right after graduation, and went to work under David Brown, who was my mentor (great guy), and who taught me everything he knows. He was doing these grayscale photomasks, and he told me, “I’m sick of doing photomasks, I’m going to teach you how to do the photomasks, and you’re going to do them.” So that’s what I did when I first started. Eventually I learned how to do the physical optics design, the beam splitters, diffusers, and other diffractive optics using fourier optics. It was about this time that the telecom market went in the toilet.
• #8: Now MEMS Optical had gotten a lot of venture capital funding, and had built a new building, bought a lot of equipment, hired a bunch of people. But the orders never materialized. So there were layoffs, and I was putting my resume out there. I found what I thought was a great opportunity to go back home to Maryland and work for a defense contractor their doing optics. Turned out not to be the right fit, so I called the guys up at MEMS Optical, and they told me, “You know, as a matter of fact, David Brown has decided to go do missionary work in China, and we need someone to replace him.” So I went back to work there, and became a senior optical engineer, doing all the classical optics design as well as the physical optics and the photomasks, so really the whole package.
• #9: MEMS Optical was bought by Jenoptik in February 2006, and a lot of things changed then, only I didn’t realize until much later. Kind of like how the frog in the pot doesn’t realize the water has started boiling. Our quality manager passed away in late 2008, and I took over for him. I always felt that I had an intuitive understanding of quality. When I first went to work for David Brown, and we were both making photomasks it was very confusing. So I told him, “Look, why don’t we make a log, a simple excel spreadsheet with some hyperlinks, and we’ll assign a unique identifier to each mask. You can access the log, and I can access the log, and that way we’ll never assign the same number to two different masks.” Here I was just out of college, 22 years old, I had never heard of quality or Deming, but I understood at an intuitive level that if you want to have an impact on something you need to be able to measure it. So by creating this log, we were able to collect a tremendous amount of data. We could see when we sent the mask, when we got the mask back, what vendor did we send it to, which tool did they write it on, and did the mask come back good or bad. Because, you see, the grayscale process is very finicky and not all the masks came back good. At that time, we were getting about 85% good masks, so 15% bad masks. So now that we had that data we could start to analyze and see why did the mask take so long to be written, if a mask came back bad, we could look at which tool it was written on, and see if there was something about that tool. It is one of my proudest achievements that by the time I left MEMS Optical, I was able to reduce the time it took to receive a mask back from 10 days to 6 days, the cost of mask from $2,500 to $1,250, and the quality of the masks from 85% good masks to 100% good masks.