W565 Air Permeability and Burst Pressure

Last week’s production yielded two wafers (502 & 504) with defect-free membranes. 506 had a high pinhole density. These wafers have a TEOS mask and were annealed twice; the first anneals did not produce pores so they were annealed again at 1000 C. From these results, it seems that the first anneal “seeds” pore formation…

Last week I etched three wafers of different silicon thicknesses (10 nm, 15 nm, 20 nm). All the wafers had a TEOS mask with the standard three layer sputtered film on the front. Not that surprising is the fact that the thinnest membrane showed pores while the 15 and 20 nm membranes did not at…

As Jim suggested, we are not only going to reproduce what Chris and Tom did in the Nature paper but also trying to test the charge screening effect based on different salt concentrations. To do such experiments, we need to charge our Si membrane and at the same time oxidize it. At the end of…

I believe that we can use MgF2 nanomembranes as electroosmotic pumps, along the same lines as pnc-Si and NPN materials. To first get a sense of how much pumping I would expect, I wanted to know what the zeta potential of these membranes would be, as the potential is directly proportional to the amount of…

A bit of background: In order to quantify how permeable a tissue barrier is, we use a method known as trans epithelial electrical resistance (TEER). Cells are grown on a permeable growth substrate in a transwell format. When the cells are not confluent, there is a continuous diffusion of ions across the two sides of…