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Microfabrication is a critical area to many branches of science and engineering. However, to many students accustomed to seeing transistors as things that come in a lab kit, it is an obscure subtopic of their discipline. Beginning in 2009, the authors undertook a broad multidisciplinary approach to bring microfabrication into all aspects of the Binghamton University science and engineering curriculum. This program was coupled with a comprehensive assessment activity to evaluate the program's effectiveness and continuously improve it year by year. This paper reports the details of the implementation process, the techniques that were found to bring a hands-on experience to large classes, and the lessons learned from the assessments of this program to make this topic a mainstream part of engineering and science education.

Polarization-resolved imaging can provide information about the composition and topography of the environment that is invisible to the eye. We demonstrate a practical method to fabricate arrays of small, orthogonal wire-grid polarizers (WGPs) that can be matched to individual detector pixels, and we present design curves that relate the structure to the polarization extinction ratio obtained. The photonic area lithographically mapped (PALM) method uses multiple-exposure conventional and holographic lithography to create subwavelength patterns easily aligned to conventional mask features. WGPs with polarization extinction ratios of ~10 at a 1.55 [micro]m wavelength were fabricated, and square centimeter areas of square micrometer size WGP arrays suitable for polarization-resolved imaging on glass were realized. OCIS codes: 090.2880, 230.5440.