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NOVEMBER 2022 I DESIGN007 MAGAZINE 17 school, I would equally consider an EE or a physics major undergraduate. Shaughnessy: Were you interested in electro- magnetics in high school? How did you end up focusing on it? What led you that way? Bogatin: I went through physics at MIT. I learned the standard physics, mechanics, the EM, vibrational, then quantum mechan- ics, thermodynamics, all that stuff that every undergraduate gets, but I was really interested in astrophysics and cosmology. For graduate school, I debated, "What do I want to do?" is was in the early days of lasers, and I knew that whatever I did, lasers would be part of it. So, I went to University of Arizona, Tucson, which had an optical science center. I learned about lasers, quantum optics, and I worked on a rela- tivity experiment that became my disserta- tion. It was the best of all worlds. I worked on a cosmology experi- ment that used lasers on a benchtop in a lab. When I got my degree in quantum optics and cosmology, my mother said, "Where are you going to find want ads saying, 'Cosmologists wanted, apply here'?" Aer grad school, I started at Bell Labs, and I was the token physicist with a bunch of chemists. at was how I got into this field. ey were working on circuit board technol- ogy, building and selecting new materials and fabrication techniques. ey needed to under- stand how their material selections influenced performance. at was how I began applying the electro- magnetics to figure out, "How do signals inter- act with the materials, the interconnects, and the decisions they made about designing the materials and photoimage materials and differ- ent copper platings?" Every job I aer that had a strong element of needing to understand the electromagnetics. I thought my physics background helped me get up to speed. I learned about signals and the electronics part of it. Now I teach electronics, so it worked. Holden: Looking at your crystal ball, what can we look forward to if they continue to reduce this size of those devices down to the atom level and consequently their rise and fall times get increasingly shorter? Bogatin: I think about that a lot. I'm not an expert on the semicon- ductor physics. Some of the impurity doping levels are at PPM lev- els. When you get to the size of a channel, the volume of a chan- nel where you get only two or three doping atoms in there, how do you design a repro- ducible part where you have statistics start influencing the behavior of those elements? I believe there's a definite limit to Moore's Law as we design components today. I think Intel is at the 4-nanometer node. at's 40 angstroms for the channel size, so maybe it will be in the 2-nanometer node soon, which may be the limit to where statistically you can't dope a channel enough. What's beyond that? I hear talk about growing in the third dimension and building multilayer active devices. If I was a young physicist or engineer and I wanted to get into semiconductor devices, I would be looking at molecular electronics and quantum computing. I have a professor col- league here who's an expert in genetic com-