Sheaths, Microelectronics Fabrication and the Founding of PSST

The many contributions of Prof. Noah Hershkowitz to low temperature plasmas span from fundamental science to service to the profession. His investigations of sheaths and ion acceleration into surfaces provided great insights into the fundamental processes that we need to understand to optimize reactant fluxes incident onto wafers for microelectronics fabrication. The competing influence of multiple ion species in formation of the pre-sheath is the launching pad for accelerating the many different types of ions produced in plasma etching mixtures through the sheath proper. In this talk, we will discuss the evolution of fundamental sheath studies by Prof. Hershkowitz to the modeling of multi-component, multi-frequency and non-sinusoidal capacitively and inductively coupled plasmas for microelectronics fabrications. These early discussions on sheaths and ion energy distributions occurred at a time when Prof. Hershkowitz was in the process of founding the journal Plasma Sources Science and Technology, one of his greatest services to the profession. PSST was founded in acknowledgement of the need for translational research from the fundamental to the applied. Several "behind the curtain" debates on the founding of PSST will be shared and Prof. Hershkowitz's influence on editors-in-chief following him will be discussed.