Chemical Eng BS, now a Process Engineer working on memory chip R&D
While studying Chemical Engineering at University of Washington, I was an undergraduate Research Assistant at the Washington Nanofabrication Facility and did research on developing through-silicon vias for 3D integrated circuit devices. I met a recruiter and hiring manager from Micron at career fair on campus, interviewed on-site, and moved to Boise, Idaho, in July 2017 to work in the Manufacturing Development Engineering (MDE) department.
My first role was a Shift Process Engineer in Dry Etch process area, where I supported process teams using statistical process control (SPC) methodologies to monitor, troubleshoot, and correct product deviations and improve R&D yield and efficiency. In 2019, I completed a 4-month rotation focused on Fault Detection (FD), mainly building and updating univariate analysis (UVA) strategies to monitor baseline processes, resolve chronic issues, eliminate nuisance flags, and prevent excursions. This led to a collaborative project to automate the creation of FD UVAs using Python, which resulted in 1,350 labor hours per year saved.
In 2020, I got a position as a Shift Lead Engineer in Diffusion/Implant process area, where I supervised a team of ten process engineers, equipment engineers, and equipment technicians; coordinated area priorities, scheduled preventive maintenance, and unscheduled repairs; performed coaching and onboarding of new hires; and led the Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) team for the Implant area.
In April 2022, I transitioned to my current role as MDE Process Engineer in DIFI, owning heat treatment anneal processes that operate in Reflow, Alloy, and Cure diffusion furnaces. In this role, I support research, development, and transfer of new NAND, DRAM, and emerging technologies processes to high-volume manufacturing facilities through data analysis, SPC, tool fault detection strategies, as well as data science and visualization using SQL and Tableau.
I am the process owner of heat treatment anneals on Diffusion furnaces
Even though my official title is Process Engineer, I am known in my department as a Process Owner, meaning I am the subject matter expert (SME) and "own" certain processes used in the production of semiconductor memory chips. My processes are all heat treatment anneals that run in different types of Diffusion furnaces, namely Reflow, Alloy, and Cure, depending on what stage of the semiconductor fabrication process they are used for.
I am involved in research and development in our Boise fab, and also transfer these Anneal processes to our NAND, DRAM, and emerging technologies high-volume manufacturing facilities. My day to day is filled with a lot of data mining and analysis; statistical process control (SPC) to monitor the product quality of our R&D chips; enabling and maintaining tool fault detection (FD) strategies; data science and visualization using SQL and Tableau; troubleshooting any issues with my processes or the equipment (tools) they run on; and collaborating with our area shift teams, other process owners in Boise, and engineers all around the world in our other Micron sites.
Be authentic, identify your strengths and opportunities for growth.
As a young adult and early career professional, you may have an idea of what you want to do or achieve long-term, i.e. your passion and main driving force, or maybe you don't and are still looking for something that sparks meaning. Either one is okay! The most important thing is that you are authentically you. It takes a lot of courage and self-awareness to identify your strengths and opportunities for growth -- both of which can be hard!
If you are constantly putting yourself down or downplaying your accomplishments, you may not feel like you have a lot of strengths. In that case, you need to allow yourself to be comfortable speaking about your successes and accomplishments, even though it may feel like bragging. In fact, it's a great skill to be able to brag, because that is how you sell yourself! Practice by writing down a brag sheet and rehearsing a couple elevator pitches where you share something cool that you recently worked on, such as a project milestone (even small ones!) or a problem that stumped you for a while (those take tenacity and grit!). These should boost your confidence when networking and interviewing.
Re-framing what you perceive to be your "weaknesses" as Opportunities is a great way to pivot from a fixed to a growth mindset. We are not defined by our problems but by how we choose to approach them. Take a look at yourself regularly and reflect on what has been giving you problems lately. You can also ask for feedback from anyone you work or collaborate with. It can be tough to put yourself in a vulnerable position like that, but you will gain so much insight and potentially learn something about yourself. After identifying your problem spots, research ways you can tangibly improve. Are there any new skills you could learn, articles or books you can read, experts you can reach out to?
Data science contributions: Python automation, Tableau visualizations
While a Shift Process Engineer in Dry Etch, I completed a 4-month rotation focused on Fault Detection (FD), building and updating univariate analysis (UVA) strategies to monitor baseline processes, resolve chronic issues, eliminate nuisance flags, and prevent excursions. The work that this entailed, specifically building the UVA collections, was very manual and labor-intensive, which is why the rotation position existed in the first place. A major outcome of my rotation is that after completing it, I joined forces with a few other engineers in a collaborative project to automate the creation of FD UVAs using Python, which resulted in 1,350 labor hours per year saved. I made a significant contribution by writing the back-end code for several recipe ingesters, which were large functions that basically imported a spreadsheet or HTML file from the tool containing hundreds of rows and parsed them to eventually (skipping a few steps here) generate a different file which could be uploaded to the UVA collection software. The process of having to build each UVA collection one at a time could take 6-12 hours, and was instead reduced to just a few minutes!!
Since switching areas and roles, I have become an expert in creating Tableau reports and using SQL to query the databases used in these reports. I am most proud of a report with three complex but related dashboards: a timeline view of all the FD flags that the area gets every day, a weekly tracker monitoring the moving average and glidepath for our yearly goal, and finally a dashboard that lets users dive deep into the trends for each day/week/month and sorted by top hitter tool, UVA model, and recipe. Essentially this lets the other Process Owners keep track of our flags and raise visibility of chronic issue that require investigation.
