New sputtering system

A few weeks ago, I did some RTP annealing of NSN and OSO stacks. The purpose of this annealing experiment was hoping to capture the onset of pore formation and see whether there is any different behavior between NSN and OSO stacks. The annealing temperature was set to 700C. The ramp rate was 50C/s all…

Sugiura 2010 (Anal. Chem) This paper details a PDMS microfluidic system to perform dose response assays  (what I’m hoping to achieve over this summer). They use serial dilutions to get separate trials spanning six orders of magnitude, showing an optimal dosage to kill HeLa cells. Their system is very efficient, using very shallow channels and balancing the…

Last week I mentioned that a two step anneal may help with the tears that are forming on the membranes when they are annealed post-etch.  The recipe I used was a 10 C/s ramp to 600 C, hold 60 s, 10 C/s ramp to the setpoint, hold 60 s, ramp down.  I annealed membranes with…

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 obtained some perplexing results today that I have re-run multiple times. Ozone treating w504 permits the passage of water in a wet/dry format w/o PVP coating. I ran several experiments with the constant pressure device with water on the top side and dry on the bottom. Some of the membranes had once been wet/wet,…

In order to further test the model, I’ve set up additional rhodamine diffusion assays.  In each case, the setup is similar to the nanoparticle/protein/dna separations –  20 uL of .5 mM rhodamine on the top of a SepCon and 20 uL .1 M KCl on the bottom.  Two different membrane geometries were used so far…