I also tend to look at the ultimate manufacturability of things. It's important to all members of our group that the work eventually can be applied to mass production. The team includes many graduate students and researchers working as postdoctoral fellows. The work is coordinated with the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and with a small Connecticut company called Scientific Research Associates. Each member of the group pursues one aspect of the overall project.
Some researchers build actual, physical devices onto silicon.
Some create new processes for building the devices. Others test simulations on computers before a single grain of sand is melted into silicon. Computers are being used to build more complicated computers, just as science fiction writer Isaac Asimov predicted decades ago in his stories about robots. The process for making a microprocessor is incredibly complicated, often involving 20 layers of deposition and etching. As a result, even the process itself must be modeled on a computer.