AN ENVIRONMENT OF CHALLENGES

The competitive nature of manufacturing of microelectronics has meant that completely new generations of devices and completely new electronic materials and processes have been required on a time scale of months rather than years or decades. One consequence of this situation is that a book covering materials specific to the 

As we will see, electronic applications have only one feature in common - they place higher demands for performance on their materials than any other class of products. Working with these materials is truly working in an environment of challenges. 

This chapter considers some of the issues currently facing the microelectronics engineer. It refers to constituents of the circuits without explanation, as this would disrupt the flow of the discussion. For the reader who is unsure of the terminology. Chapter 2 presents a review of some of the basic physics of semiconductors. Selected active devices that are currently joined to produce an integrated circuit are described briefly in Chapter 3. Finally, Chapter 4 presents a brief review of concepts from Materials Science that are important in the discussions in later chapters. The details of the terminology are relatively unimportant for purposes of this chapter. 

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This particular reaction model was chosen because the authors proposed that proton transfer should be concerted with decarboxylation. This model reaction is quite exothermic in the gas phase (— 61.9 kcal mol-1), but in an environment of low dielectric (s = 4), as might be expected in an enzyme active site,38 the AH is a reasonable 17.6 kcal mol-1. This barrier is —25 kcal mol-1 less than the AH calculated by these authors for the uncatalyzed decarboxylation of orotate in a water dielectric, which is almost identical to the magnitude of catalysis observed experimentally.1,6 The authors thus concluded that concerted decarboxylation and proton transfer to the 4-oxygen appears to be a viable catalytic pathway. This particular viewpoint has been challenged by Warshel et al., whose quantum mechanical studies argue against pre-protonation.61... 

The challenge for public policy is to develop a development and review process which minimizes all four types of mistakes. This process must exist in an environment of substantial scientific and social uncertainty. If society develops a process for avoiding the second type of mistake efficiently, it will reduce both types of uncertainty, and be in a much better position to avoid the other three types of mistakes as well. 

The challenge for society is to establish a decision making process—a process Chat encompasses research, production and regulatory elements—that will minimize these four types of mistakes. And f ile such a process would be difficult to establish even under the best of circumstances, we must develop this process in an environment of substantial uncertainty. 

One particular challenge for personnel governing a CRM system is the involvement of third-party organisations tasked wholly or partly with the responsibility for undertaking CRM work. In most cases organisations will not be able to transfer their risks and responsibilities onto third-parties and therefore an environment of close co-operation and managed expectations is warranted. In particular, where a manufacturer is required to comply with particular regulatory standards, it would be wise to flow down appropriate performance requirements to any subcontractors. 

We have not indicated the reagents employed in the reactions by which ethylene and propene are converted to the compounds shown Because of patent requirements different companies often use different processes Although the processes may be different they share the common characteristic of being extremely efficient The industrial chemist faces the challenge of producing valuable materials at low cost Success in the industrial environment re quires both an understanding of chemistry and an... 

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