I came to HKUST in December 1992. I remember those early days very well. Fond memories indeed. That was a time of excitement about building a new university. I was one of the few in the department with university teaching experience, after teaching at the State University of New York at Buffalo for 12 years. I was one of the youngest full professors there, and suddenly I became a senior professor here with lots of responsibilities. So much fun.
Iwas one of the committee members helping to define the operation of MFF (now NFF). I was really delighted that Prof. Tai-Chin LO was able to find a used 4” wafer fab in California and transferred it here intact. It was one of the few fully operational silicon lines in Hong Kong and China. What can we do with it and fully realize its potential? Since my research area was in Optics and Photonics, I thought of doing optoelectronic integrated circuits (OEIC), as well as integrated optics. But those are not mainstream in microelectronics and could not make good use of the silicon fabrication capabilities at MFF. They needed LiNbO3 substrates, not silicon. We could perhaps grow LiNbO3 and other nonlinear optical materials on silicon. Indeed, we tried it for a while, with a pulsed laser deposition system that we set up.
My romance with MFF really started when I realized that we could build a display system with silicon IC. In 1994, I was starting to build the Center for Display Research (CDR) with lots of government funding. What better use of MFF is there besides integrating silicon IC and liquid crystal! Thus was born the project of Liquid Crystal on Silicon (LCOS). Prof. Ho-chi HUANG and I were really having fun working on it. We were the pioneers in this new area. Our LCOS performance was leading the world. We published tons of papers on this topic.
Another fun research area was thin film transistors. As I got more and more involved with displays, I realized that we should get into fabricating thin film transistors (TFT) on glass at HKUST. Amorphous silicon TFT was used extensively at that time. Low-temperature polycrystalline silicon research was just beginning. I was able to convince Prof. Man WONG to start a project of LTPS. That turned out to be a long-lasting collaboration and I am really glad that Prof. WONG is now the world-famous guru on this subject. We diversified to oxides, and he made so many new discoveries.
I am really glad to be associated with NFF. I wish it will continue to flourish and carry on our tradition of training students and producing great results. I am thankful to all the staff at NFF who are so efficient in maintaining the facilities and are so helpful to the students and faculty.
