From the past experiments we know that it is not easy to form pores in thicker silicon layer. It is mainly because that higher energy is required to form open holes in a thicker silicon film. Dave showed us less but bigger pores were formed in a 50nm thick silicon film after annealing. According to…
SU-8 3010 (MicroChem) was chosen for its improved adhesion strength, and reduced stress. MicroChem also provides a datasheet on the usage of this negative resist that was followed as a baseline. For Post Exposure Bake (PEB) two methods were implemented, standard procedure, and part of Li, et al process: 55C for 2 hours to reduce…
The schematic of the slot device is shown below. The main support structure is the pnc-Si membrane with Au or Ag metal on both sides. There is a conformal covering of Alumina shown in blue in the figure which actually makes the slot. This type of structure helps in squeezing the light in the nanoholes….
Because the Barcikowski lab intends to use the nanoparticles they sent us, relatively high yields are necessary for any step that cleans them up. This is unfortunate, because in every single separation that we’ve done (with one exception mentioned further on) we never see yields higher than about 5%. We’d thought that the problem was…
I have been trying to fabricate my own Indium Tin Oxide (ITO) electrodes on coverslips for the BBB device in order to minimize the working distance for any microscopy. Currently, I am using microscope slides that are way too thick (mm). Coverslips are generally about 0.2mm thick. I am using a combination of sputter, photolithography,…
Comsol modeling was done to find the ideal channel height and volumetric flow rate. What is clear from the simulation is that ever increasing flow rates in the model lead to increased clearance and decreasing channel heights give some benefit but not on the order previously expected. In addition, (Depner 2005) shows that increasing the flow…
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…
The Barcikowski samples, sent from Germany a month ago, continue to be a fecund source of inconsistant data. Using the DLS to monitor several filtrations has resulted in a series of baffling results that I think I’ve finally begun to understand. First, the promising results: A DLS of Sample 1 (a mixture of bioconjugated gold…
I have created a successfully sealed flow chamber with this current device (V2.4), with the caveat that I sealed off the top chamber and was unable to test leaking from the top to the bottom. Again, the dialysis chips from Dean’s work were used, as well as the same bulk microscope slide electrodes. Improvements…
The CHA e-beam evaporator in RIT had been used traditionally for the deposition of metal on the pnc-Si membranes. The most important factor for metal deposition on the membranes is that the nanoholes must not be blocked. So the metal deposited needs to be smooth and continuous. Ag or Au does not adhere onto Si…