Explained: chemical vapor deposition
In a sense, says MIT chemical engineering professor Karen Gleason, you can trace the technology of chemical vapor deposition, or CVD, all the way back to prehistory: “When the cavemen lit a lamp and soot was deposited on the wall of a cave,” she says, that was a rudimentary form of CVD. Today, CVD is a basic tool of manufacturing — used in everything from sunglasses to potato-chip bags — and is fundamental to the production of much of today’s electronics. It is also a technique subject to constant refining and expansion, pushing materials research in new directions — such as the production of large-scale sheets of graphene, or the development of solar cells that could be “printed” onto a sheet of paper or plastic. In that latter area, Gleason, who also serves as MIT’s associate provost, has been a pioneer. She developed what had traditionally been a high-temperature process used to...