When your book has jumped from 1,140,557 to 726,360 to, at last check, 188,346 on the Amazon sales list over the past couple of weeks, that's great progress but it's no indication of best-seller status coming any time soon.
But reaching number 8 on the site's circuit manufacturing category and number 42 on its semiconductor list reflects a growing connection to the book's target audience, which is comprised of semiconductor manufacturing professionals, academics, the micro/nano research community, and a handful of precision-cleaning fanatics willing to shell out just south of $250 (or a little less on the used market).
Karen Reinhardt would be thrilled to sell several thousand copies of the recently published, Amazon chart climbing Handbook of Silicon Wafer Cleaning Technology: Second Edition (which she coedited with Werner "Mr. RCA Standard Clean" Kern). Perhaps just as importantly, she's quite happy to get her weekends and summer hours back (at least some of them).
After nearly three years of researching, writing, editing, bugging contributors, seeking permissions, and compiling what should become a fixture on reference library shelves in chip fabs, equipment and materials houses, universities, labs, and consortia, Karen celebrated the publication of the five-part, 11-chapter (four of which she wrote or cowrote), 722-page (with 1748 references) tome among friends and colleagues at Sematech's Surface Preparation and Cleaning Conference in Austin last week. Many of the book's contributors---IMEC's Paul Mertens, FSI's Jeff Butterbaugh, SEZ's Glenn Gale, for example---were on hand too. Even the old wet cleaning guru himself, Werner Kern (who also edited the first edition of the handbook, which was published in 1993), temporarily came out of retirement and made the trip.
Karen's an industry consultant these days at Cameo Consulting in Silicon Valley, helping companies figure out their technical and strategic marketing, M&A and outsourcing gameplans, and the like. She's been deeply involved in the semiconductor wafer cleaning/surface prep community for many years, with a resume that includes stints at Novellus, GaSonics, AMD, and Cypress, as well as coauthorship of more than 30 technical papers. She also participates in the ITRS surface preparation technical working group.
I spoke with Karen a couple of weeks ago about the process of getting the book put together and published, but more of our conversation focused on the history, current practices, and future challenges of wet and dry wafer cleaning, stripping, conditioning, and preparation. Look for some of what Karen had to say in next week's Chip Shots.
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