PISTOL

The PISTOL ANR Industrial Chair Project is a collaboration between TOTAL, a French energy company with interests in photovoltaics, and the LPICM (Physics of Interfaces and Thin Films Laboratory), a CNRS laboratory located at the Ecole Polytechnique that specializes in materials processing using plasmas. The chair holder will be Dr. Erik Johnson, a CNRS researcher at the LPICM, director of the NanoSil research group, and inventor on five key patents covering processes being explored in this project. The PISTOL project aims to apply the expertise, savoir faire, and intellectual property of the LPICM, (including jointly held patents with TOTAL), to solve two well-defined challenges in semiconductor processing by using novel plasma techniques. The techniques deployed are all complete technological ruptures, invented at the LPICM, and hence offer either (1) a significant cost-reduction over the competing processes or (2) a process unavailable by any other technique. Beyond these technological ruptures, the project addresses the strategic necessities of both partners in the short and long term. In the short term, the project has been designed to include a task on value creation. The goal of this task is to regularly quantify the economic benefit of the processes developed, and then to determine the best course of action to create value from the results of the projects. Such courses of action include direct use (by Total or its affiliates), licensing to a third party, involvement of a third industrial partner (such as an equipment maker), or joining forces with another academic partner. Looking towards long term goals, the project is deeply committed to education and training through research, at all levels of study from Masters' courses taught by industrial experts, through internships, to doctoral students and post-doctoral researchers. The LPICM is uniquely positioned to execute this project due not only to this expertise and intellectual property, but also for their in-house capability to develop such processes from plasma reactor design to material and device testing. The laboratory's long experience in investigating the science of plasma processing (the role of plasma-formed particles, using novel chemistries, exploring non-traditional excitation techniques) for a broad range of applications (display, photovoltaics, optoelectronics, …) is the foundation on which this project is built. In addition to these reasons, from TOTAL's perspective the LPICM is the ideal partner in this project due to three factors: (1) an established relationship of trust covering confidentiality during cooperative work, enabling more open discussion (2) a shared perspective on value generation, and (3) a proven ability to function with a tight feedback loop with industry.