TEM Tomography for the Identification of Nanopores in Silicon Nanomembranes
Kilean and I are working on submitting a paper to Membranes on some of our electron tomography work. Here’s some of the work that we’ve done so far:
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AJA qualification visit
Chris and I visited the AJA sputter company in Boston last week. The tool was fully functional and we were able to deposit several test wafers. Overall, we were impressed with the performance. The uniformity across a 6″ substrate was sub-1 %. This is certainly a huge improvement over the 3-5% uniformity we currently achieve…
Pore growth occurs rapidly
I’ve always suspected that the pore formation process was very quick and to confirm this I looked at a wafer that was annealed for 10 s vs. 60 s. From the distributions, it would appear that the majority of pores nucleate and grow during the ramp and first few seconds of steady state. Next, I…
300K Nanosep Permeability
ByMike HThe 300K nanosep membranes that Jess ordered came in so I ran a single set of three membranes at 21.63psi to compare their hydraulic permeability values to those of the 100K microcon membranes. As expected the 300K nanosep membranes have a much larger hydraulic permeability then that of the 100K microcons; approximately a factor of…
HMM vs. LMM diffusion
My last post dealing with this project was the first to definitively demonstrate HMM diffusion through pnc-Si. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a difference between the HMM filtrate signal for intact and digested (+RNAse) samples. As a reminder, HMM is a large protein multimer held together, partly, with RNA. We hope to show that HMM can not…
Pore control… on a wafer scale?
Last week the rotation stage broke in the middle of a deposition. The wafer came out looking very non-uniform, and judging by the color of the film there was at least a 10 nm gradient. Since I’m not sure when the motor stopped, it’s hard to say if the underlying oxide is non-uniform as well,…
100K Microcon "duds"
ByMike HI few weeks ago I posted some flow rate data based on the 100K microcons in which three of the four membranes worked fine and the other appeared to be a “dud”. I pulled the four systems apart and used the digital calipers to measure the membrane thicknesses and found the following. – The three…