Life in the Fast Lane

This story originally appeared in the 2006 issue of Vassar Views in celebration of URSI’s 20th anniversary.

Jeff Sleight ’88 has a two-year-old daughter who recently became the proud owner of a play kitchen. “It’s nothing fancy,” says Sleight, “but when you get certain pieces of the play food near the stove, it’ll say, ‘Oh, nice! You’re cooking eggs!’ They’ve got RFID tags! I was actually working briefly with a group at IBM that was looking at RF technology, but I find it amazing that it’s become this pervasive. These chips must cost 10 cents apiece, or even less, for manufacturers to be able to throw them into plastic food on a kiddie toy set.”

The times are indeed a-changin’, and Sleight himself is an architect of change. A physics major at Vassar and an URSI fellow in the first year of the program, Sleight earned his PhD in applied physics at Yale and then began his career in the semiconductor industry at Digital Equipment in the mid ’90s. The first project he worked on resulted in a significant technological breakthrough which has since become mainstream—known as SOI, or silicon-on-insulator.

Before SOI, transistors were built on huge chunks of silicon. Sleight and his team at Digital developed a process for building them on silicon dioxide, an insulator, which results in faster processors. “At the time, it was considered fairly revolutionary. People weren’t convinced you could actually pull the thing off technically, and there was a huge debate about whether it would even be an advantage to do it. I remember going to conferences, and they’d always have the late night discussion sessions and people would speculate about whether anyone would ever actually introduce something like that into manufacturing.”

Digital was dismantled and sold off to various tech giants before the project came to fruition. Sleight went to IBM-Fishkill as an advanced development engineer and took up the SOI project where he’d left off and saw it through to manufacturing. “That was actually a lot of fun—to work on something that actually made it into a product,” says Sleight. “For every hundred research ideas, maybe 10 of them make it to development, and maybe one of those makes it to manufacturing. So it was gratifying to make that kind of technical contribution so soon after grad school.”

At IBM-Fishkill, Sleight worked with a team of engineers on technology expected to come on line in a two-to-five year timeframe. “In the semiconductor world, everything moves really quickly, and the technical issues keep changing, but the goal is always making things faster and smaller. Every year, when the computers got faster and cost less, that was us.” But after six years of faster-and-smaller, Sleight was interested in taking a step back—or a step forward, depending on how you look at it—and focusing on technology that may be used five to 10 years from now.

At the time, a team was forming at IBM’s Yorktown Heights research facility to fulfill a specific mandate—“to build the world’s smallest SRAM cell.” Basically, an SRAM cell is a unit of memory, a cell for holding a one or a zero, an “on” or an “off.” A company in Taiwan had recently built what was then the smallest. “Our mandate was to build something smaller, and then demonstrate it, and then publish it. So it was a project with a very definite timeline because we knew what conference we wanted to present it in. We were never really sure whether we were going to make it, but as it turned out, we made it with, like, 12 hours to spare. So it was exciting.”

Working with a good team, says Sleight, is critically important. “You think of the lone scientist, changing everything, but it just doesn’t happen like that today. Things happen by having strong teams. You need people who work well together and who are strong technically to pull something off.”

His first experience of science as a team-driven enterprise came during ursi. He and his mentor, physics professor Robert Stearns, spent three summers at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island as part of a large collaboration working on high energy physics. “This was big science—very large teams doing long-term experiments using this huge facility to test nuclear theories. The collaboration we were part of included at least five or six universities. It was a very good experience because I got to see how a big government lab works, and I also got to interact not just with the Vassar professor but with a lot of other scientists and graduate students.”

At Brookhaven he connected with a professor from the University of Helsinki in Finland which paved the way for a Fulbright Fellowship the year after he graduated from Vassar. The lab he joined in Helsinki worked on the physics of X-ray diffraction, but the technical and scientific aspects of the project were less important to Sleight than the experience of living abroad. “It was an interesting time because Russia was still the Soviet Union, and it was going through turmoil, and Finland had always been in a precarious position, poised between western Europe and the Soviet Union. I had traveled quite a bit, but it’s a very different thing to live in another country and see the world from their perspective. I think everybody should have that experience—although I can’t say I’d recommend Finland in the month of December.”

As behooves any thinking scientist, or any thinking person, for that matter, Sleight has a bit of a love-hate relationship with technology. “ It’s scary how quickly these technological advances become mainstream and how pervasive they are. I have a friend from China who told me that there are vendors on the streets who have booths where you can take your cell phone to get it charged. I can’t remember the numbers, but it was something like a hundred million people in China have cell phones, but only 50 million have electricity, so they have to take them someplace to charge them.

“You have to wonder—are we getting ahead of ourselves?”

A little closer to home, his six-year-old son, who of course has his own computer (albeit an ancient Mac), recently asked Sleight how he learned his letters and numbers before there were computer programs that taught these things. “I tried to explain to him that when I grew up, we didn’t have computers, and I was a teenager when we got this ancient TRS-80 computer...”

Probably had to walk three miles through the snow to school, too.