In early 1987 I was attempting to develop a CVD-based tungsten process for Intel. At every step ofthe development, information that we were collecting had to be analyzed in light of theories and hypotheses from books and papers in many unrelated subjects. Thesesources were so widely different that I came to realize there was no unifying treatment of CVD and its subprocesses. More interestingly, my colleagues in the industry were from many disciplines (a surface chemist, a mechanical engineer, a geologist, and an electrical engineer werein my group). To help us understand the field of CVD and...