Previous Posts Anodic Bonding Theory, Anodic Bonding at RIT I’ve put together an anodic bonder setup here at the U of R and will be moving it inside the cleanroom shortly. I tried a couple of known combinations to see if the bonder was working properly. The general principle is to liberate sodium ions…
Key Ideas I took a wafer with ~400 chips of varying square window sizes, ran my MgF2 process, and recorded the pressures it took to burst them. Overall yield was about 20%, most of them smaller windows. I was expecting ~50% based on my previous work. Variation in the etch step destroyed the yield. MgF2 nanomembranes…
As part of my thesis work, I hope to create modular pumps and flow sensors using silicon nanomembrane technology. Devices that could generate/detect microliter and nanoliter scale flows would decrease the overall size of microsystems, replacing larger micropumps (pneumatic PDMS, Chip-sized peristaltic pumps) and costly detection schemes (laser reflectometry). These smaller devices would enable efficient scaling of ‘culture…
I want to verify that I can grow a confluent monolayer of cells on my MgF2 nanomembranes. I have tried to do this in the past, but have only gotten sparse cells overall before the membranes ruptured. I believe that part of the problem was that I was not seeding at a very high density…
I have wondered if it were possible to create free-standing, nanoporous nanomembranes out of other materials (rather than my MgF2 process). The process is general enough that it should work. The major factors are Etch Selectivity between the substrate and the deposited material Film Mechanics (some films tear themselves apart due to the relative sizes…
Nanobattery Paper Nanobattery Supplement I have long desired to make energy storage devices with our nanomembranes (supercapacitor post), mainly because they would be really great separators, having both excellent charge conduction and physical barrier resistance due to the porosity and material properties of silicon. Other groups have begun to take advantage of the increased…
Ring Resonators are photonic structures that have a very repeatable behavior. As light is guided along a path, it can evanescently couple into a very closely positioned wire (submicron gap). If the wavelength of light is just right, constructive interference can occur, causing the rings to resonate (lost through scattering). Necessarily, this causes a drop…
Vincent has asked us to integrate our nanoporous filter on top of a thin layer of silicon nitride, so that he can clean up his analyte before being exposed to his single nanopore (fabricated using a dielectric breakdown). There are many different ways to join silicon wafers together. Specifically, we wish to create the following…
Here are my thoughts on the talks I attended at BMES: OP-Thurs-1-11. BioMEMS I Oral Thursday, October 23, 2014 8:00 AM – 9:30 AM Room 008A Moderator 1: James Tunnell Moderator 2: Catherine Klapperich 8:15 AM – 8:45 AM High-throughput High-content Developmental Biology and Neurogenetics H. Lu. Abstract This talk used a number of image processing…
After a lot of trial and error with the hinge, I was able to create something usable!!! Apparently I cannot upload the .stl file or .skp file to the blog directly for “Security Reasons” I printed this one out of Makerbot ABS at 228 C (build plate 115 C), with 0.15 mm layer height slicing,…