Conducting Fab lessons in a virtual clean room

Place someone in a semiconductor fabrication laboratory for the first time, and they are unlikely to have the slightest idea where to start on the safe manufacturing of a device. Yet, these days, give most people these days a video game, and they’ll quickly figure out how to play.

KAUST electrical engineer Muhammad M. Hussain has been teaching a solid-state device laboratory course for the past 10 years. To improve the learning experience, Hussain designed vFabLab™, with the help of his former Ph.D. student, Galo Torres Sevilla, and an India-based virtual environment developer. vFabLab™ is a virtual clean room that provides an interactive environment for learning how to make semiconductor devices. Users are then better prepared to use the KAUST's Nanofabrication Core Lab. "Users who have already trained on vFabLab™ immediately feel at home with the tools in the actual cleanroom. Training such users is more stimulating because they have already crossed the beginner stage and are now looking toward applying what they have learnt," says Ahad Syed, one of the operational leads of the lab at KAUST.

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