BBB Device V2-8 with vias through bulk silicon

This week, I tried to make a large number of MgF2 nanomembranes for my collaboration with Kevin Webb.   I wanted to keep the evaporated surface as pristine as possible, so instead of using the Kapton tape to attach the chips to the platen on its face, I used double sided kapton tape. Our reserves of…

I have been exploring the efficacy of different methods for removing the native oxide from the surface of the sacrificial silicon layer prior to liftoff etch with XeF2.  As a reminder, with liftoff of SiN membranes, one can simply dip the sample in BOE solution for a few seconds to strip the native oxide.  This…

I took some force curves a while ago to see if there was any difference between wrinkled and taut membranes.  Here, I present only the data with a 15nm ‘trigger’.  The trigger is a user-defined parameter that sets the maximum deflection of the cantilever during a force curve acquisition. THe y-axis in these graphs is…

Ultimately we want to use SiN-NP filters to separate viruses or some other biological species, but repeated attempts to pass 20 nm fluorospheres in water or PBS have failed.  Au particles, however, have passed through the filters.  This post reports the results of Sarah and I attempting to pass Au particles from 20 to 100…

In collaboration with Alex Shestopalov’s lab, I started working on liquid based PEG treatment on windowed sepcon chips. The treatment is a 3-day long protocol and involves multiple washing and drying steps with different reagents. Most of our sepcon chips broke down in first few steps itself. The initial wash consists of Nanostrip (sulfuric plus nitric…

This post is a continuation of the work in Partial Etch RIE Blows out NPN Pores and MgF2 Nanomembrane Fabrication on partially etched NPN substrates. We believe the underlying NPN template influences the shape of our SERS active nanostructures and therefore the SERS properties. In this post, we’ll take a look at some of the structures resulting…