Here is the good news, folks! Electrodeposition is not just for breakfast anymore. No, no, no! We are coming out of the dark ages, into the light! Someone loves us and it is not our mothers! What am I talking about? To me, traditional electrodepo-sition harks back to images of a hunchback in a dark warehouse, stooped over boiling vats of cyanide and acid, bringing the world the largest selection of cheap jewelry, Harley Davidson parts, and car bumpers. We still need cheap jewelry and Harley parts, but chrome-plated car bumpers are a thing of the past in this plastics and environmentally-responsible age. The way I see it, modern electrode-position is one of the best methods for the formation of a dazzling array of high quality materials and structures: from electroforming space shuttle engines to the deposition of nanos-tructured films, wires, and crystals. The electronics industry has accepted electrodeposition as a full-fledged member of its construction tool box. For years it has been using electrode-position for the formation of hard disk heads. It has now grown into the area of packaging (C4 solder bumps), and to being the method of choice for forming the tiny wires that connect transistors in ultra-large scale integration (ULSI) for the formation of microprocessors. We have two views of this technology in this issue, one from the tool maker's side, from John Dukovic (the 2004 winner of the Electrodeposition Division Research Award), who discusses how modern electroplating is performed in the semiconductor foundries. The other is from Tom Moffat on why electrodeposition works so well for filling up the nanoscale trenches used as interconnects in microprocessors. The process involves bottom-up filling, which is very hard to accomplish with classic deposition methods such as chemical vapor deposition (CVD).
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