The STEM placement students are sending us weekly blogs all about their experience in the world of work!
Work experience is great and it provides students with many benefits whilst gaining skills and helping choose the right future career path for pupils. Having work experience on a Curriculum Vitae will make a person stand out to employers as they will notice they have motivation and a real passion for work. It will also help to boost a students confidence in themselves!
See how Benedikt is getting on with his STEM placement!
Week One
"I have already learnt a great deal about microelectronics in the few days that I have spent at the University of Surrey so far. Dr Radu Sporea and his PhD student, Eva Bestelink are both extremely kind and helpful in the placement. Eva has quickly taught me all I have to know about thin film transistors (TFT), source-gated transistors (SGT), amplifiers, circuits, and the physics behind these devices, as well as how to program them into SILVACO DeckBuild and TonyPlot using ATLAS and SPICE. I started by building a simple TFT and analysed its source and gate voltages and progressed onto analysing the output characteristics of SGTs, or running circuits and analysing their current-voltage characteristics through the transient piecewise linear method. I have gotten many research materials as well as a student card (giving me access to the university library), so I have more than enough resources to learn from and write my report. I cannot wait to start the actual research part of the project soon, now that we have covered all the required knowledge. Both Radu and Eva are impressed with the progress I have made and we are in a good position to progress very soon. Finally, I also got some time to work on a fun little side project, where I have to build a circuit and solder the components together to make and LED dice."
Week Two
"My supervisors Radu and Eva were away on a conference in Spain for a few days this week, which meant that I got some reading and research to do at home to prepare for the 'actual' work that lay ahead. I felt very ready after the few days just revising and learning from home, as there was a lot of interesting content covered in the first week which I now grasped fully and was eager to start the research part of the placement. At the end of the week, we started by analysing the transfer and output characteristics of an enhancement mode and a depletion mode SGT. I faced quite a few challenges with the depletion mode SGT, as it is supposed to be normally on a device, meaning that there is always current flowing through it, however, there was a problem with the doping in the code, and it took a while until we had identified what it was and got the code working again. Once we were happy with the two devices, we were able to plug them into the circuit and analyse the DC characteristics, showing that the devices were very good at amplifying signals."
Week Three
"This week was very challenging. We started off by testing a control device that we can later compare to the new device and see if the improvement that we expect is really there. This was also important to check all the code and make sure that everything is working so that we can test the new device as best as possible. Both the DC and AC analysis involved a lot of troubleshooting, and nothing worked out the way we wanted it to at first. In the end, there was a short line of code in the DC analysis which was not supposed to be there and had severely affected our results, and we were using values that were off by only 0.01 in the AC analysis, which changed the output from 200 to 20000, or more. I learnt a lot about what its like to do proper research this week, and how you have to always stay focused, creative and work well in a team in order to solve the challenges that you face, otherwise it will be much harder to solve them."
Week Four
"This was my last week at the University of Surrey, and it was definitely the most interesting because we started getting some results. The week was mostly running simulations in the background, while I plotted data from the previous simulations. We found very high gain in some devices, and more linear behaviour in other, which is what we were looking for.
We tested many different amplifier circuit configurations and devices, leading to different and interesting results. Finally, we ran the simulations in SILVACO, but plotted the graphs in Origin, because it was much better for processing data that way. Although we did not entirely find what we were looking for yet, I am really glad to have been a part of the foundational research for this project, and I'm excited to hear about where it will go next, and will definitely stay in touch with Radu and Eva. I loved my SATRO experience, and would definitely recommend it further."
Week Two
"My supervisors Radu and Eva were away on a conference in Spain for a few days this week, which meant that I got some reading and research to do at home to prepare for the 'actual' work that lay ahead. I felt very ready after the few days just revising and learning from home, as there was a lot of interesting content covered in the first week which I now grasped fully and was eager to start the research part of the placement. At the end of the week, we started by analysing the transfer and output characteristics of an enhancement mode and a depletion mode SGT. I faced quite a few challenges with the depletion mode SGT, as it is supposed to be normally on a device, meaning that there is always current flowing through it, however, there was a problem with the doping in the code, and it took a while until we had identified what it was and got the code working again. Once we were happy with the two devices, we were able to plug them into the circuit and analyse the DC characteristics, showing that the devices were very good at amplifying signals."
Week Three
"This week was very challenging. We started off by testing a control device that we can later compare to the new device and see if the improvement that we expect is really there. This was also important to check all the code and make sure that everything is working so that we can test the new device as best as possible. Both the DC and AC analysis involved a lot of troubleshooting, and nothing worked out the way we wanted it to at first. In the end, there was a short line of code in the DC analysis which was not supposed to be there and had severely affected our results, and we were using values that were off by only 0.01 in the AC analysis, which changed the output from 200 to 20000, or more. I learnt a lot about what its like to do proper research this week, and how you have to always stay focused, creative and work well in a team in order to solve the challenges that you face, otherwise it will be much harder to solve them."
Week Four
"This was my last week at the University of Surrey, and it was definitely the most interesting because we started getting some results. The week was mostly running simulations in the background, while I plotted data from the previous simulations. We found very high gain in some devices, and more linear behaviour in other, which is what we were looking for.
We tested many different amplifier circuit configurations and devices, leading to different and interesting results. Finally, we ran the simulations in SILVACO, but plotted the graphs in Origin, because it was much better for processing data that way. Although we did not entirely find what we were looking for yet, I am really glad to have been a part of the foundational research for this project, and I'm excited to hear about where it will go next, and will definitely stay in touch with Radu and Eva. I loved my SATRO experience, and would definitely recommend it further."
- Benedikt Schultes
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