Rupak Bardhan Roy

From a Caltech lecture hall to modern cleanrooms, Feynman’s vision of the atomic frontier continues to guide scientific ambition even today. During the fourth year of my doctoral research, my Ph.D. advisor gifted me a humongous printed volume. It was an IEEE anthology of selected academic papers, on microfabrication and miniaturization, published over a period of 50 years. That beauty started with a transcript of Professor Richard Feynman’s famous classic talk given on December 29, 1959 at...

The danger is not technology itself, but the quiet, unquestioned surrender to its conveniences. A few months ago, ChatGPT unveiled a new health feature that allows users to upload medical test reports for analysis, carefully stopping just short of formal clinical advice. On paper, it was a modest extension of an already ubiquitous tool. In practice, it signalled something larger: the quiet expansion of machines into domains once considered deeply human. Around the same time, a television news...

From missed opportunities in the 1960s to today’s fab ambitions, India’s semiconductor quest hinges on aligning world-class chip design with homegrown manufacturing. In the context of the ‘Make in India’ initiative, our ambition of becoming an independent semiconductor‑manufacturing hub has become a national discourse. Having spent the last decade and a half in hands‑on micro-manufacturing, both in academic and industrial R&D with a few patents in the field, I know how crucial this field is...