Next time you're curled up in front of the TV, eating chips while texting and surfing the Web, remember that Normandale Community College is helping to make it all possible.

Normandale, in Bloomington, is the only community college in the U.S. that offers an associate degree in vacuum and thin-film technology. It's a field that's much in demand, as thin films are used in a wide and growing range of familiar items.

Every electronic device uses thin film in some way. TV screens and phone displays are coated to bring images to life. Windows use the coatings for energy efficiency. And film coatings on the inside of chip bags keep the product fresh.

But Normandale is focused on the thin-film coatings used in computer chips and computer hard drives. Partnering with firms from Minnesota to Silicon Valley and beyond, the college teaches students as well as seasoned industry engineers about operating and maintaining the vacuum machinery.

"We're teaching technicians," said the course's leader, Del Smith, a retired Honeywell engineer and a black belt in the Six Sigma process-improvement method. "There are probably 300 vacuum technicians working in Bloomington, and there are companies in New York state that are begging for our graduates." A typical starting salary for graduates is in the $40,000-$50,000 range, Smith said, and it's possible for experienced technicians to make over $100,000.

Smith's class is not for the faint of heart, or soft of brain. On Monday, he and 10 students discussed concepts ranging from laminar flow to cosine distribution to the kinetic theory of gases.

Thin-film application demands extreme precision. The coatings, often silicon- or gallium-based, are applied in a vacuum, in multiple layers that each may be only a few atoms thick. Some of the vacuum systems used in the industry cost upward of $50 million, and Smith's students may be running them someday.

The college is in the second year of a three-year, $800,000 grant from the National Science Foundation that supports its "telepresence" instruction. Six members of the class checked in via videoconference from Ireland, where they work for Seagate Technology, a California-based company with more than 2,500 employees in Bloomington and Shakopee. Normandale also works with Cypress Semiconductor Corp., a California-based maker of flash memory, microcontrollers and programmable chips.

Adam Wise, a second-year student from Shakopee, said he enjoys learning the quirks of what he calls "a pretty unintuitive technology. It's all about the physics of how it works.

"I still have no idea what I want to do with my life," Wise said, "and this sounds like a field with good career prospects."

John Reinan • 612-673-7402