[Invited] Picosecond acoustics: from lab to fab

International audienceThe main goal of this lecture is to give an outlook of the numerous and various applications that the picosecond acoustic technique has met in the industrial world. The story started a few years after its invention by Prof. H. Maris. Indeed, Rudolph Technologies (now ONTO) rapidly realized that such a technique was the missing one in the industrial world for controlling the thickness of thin metal films. That was the beginning of the Metapulse® story, a full automatized tool dedicated to microelectronics applications and that can be found in any production company worthy of the name. More recently, picosecond acoustics and especially its variant based on laser-tuning, the so-called Colored Picosecond Acoustics or APiC, have been shown to be very useful for many other industrial applications in topics as different as space mirror, radio-frequency filtering, flat and smart glass, solar cells,