Now we already confirmed that pores are able to form in both oxide/silicon/oxide and nitride/silicon/nitride system. Here comes an interesting question- how about nitride/silicon/oxide and oxide/silicon/nitride system? In the past week, another two different stacks including SiN(30nm)/ a-Si(25nm)/SiO2(30nm) and SiO2(30nm)/a-Si(25nm)/SiN(30nm) were tested. The nitride film was deposited with 25 W bias and the silicon with…
Last week, I deposited silicon nitride/ amorphous silicon/ silicon nitride stack and then annealed the free standing stack after etching the substrate. The nitride film was deposited with 25W bias and the silicon film with 5W bias. The thickness for the nitride film is 30nm where it is 25nm for silicon. One of the initial…
On the 13th of September we reviewed our recent progress on EO. Maryna and Jirachai (Borkholder group) gave presentations. I’ve uploaded PDF files of each of their presentations. Maryna’s presentation: MarynaEO Jarachai’s presentation: EO_Testing_Report (PPT) EO_Testing_Report (PDF) Bubble formation in electrolytic cells
Hi All, This is my first blog on the NRG group. I am working on testing the biocompatibility and of PEGylated pncSi surfaces. To start with, I and Nakul began with checking the activation status of neutrophils on PEG treated glass cover slips. So here are details of the experiment we performed. Hypothesis: PEG treated…
I tried putting Ag/AgCl electrodes on the surfaces of the membrane for EO pumping. The experiments were done in RIT with Jirachai. In these experiments the goal was to observe the change in liquid droplet volume on the front side of the membrane, due to EO pumping from liquid reservoir on the other side of…
A few weeks ago, professor Mike Aziz in Harvard University helped to annealed two samples and in-situ imaged the early stage of pore formation using their Jeol2010-hot-stage-TEM. The oxide seemed intact during the process. The sample was unannealed 20(bottom)/15(a-si)/10(top) three stack with removing the substrate. The first sample was heating to 693C. They took one…
Two high school students, Nick and Nikita, were supervised to study the effects our Sepcon membranes had on potential charge based separations. Using standard 30 nm cutoff Sepcons and the pressure cell, they performed a set of experiments with high (1 M) and low concentration (100 mM) KCl. They measured the conductivity of the filtrate…
To this point, I have shown that our membranes are stable with the use of INT’s developer over time. I have also shown that their developer has statistically similar flow properties to that of water, and is a viable option to pass through our membranes. This post will discuss the possibility of using their unique…
The thickness of bottom oxide in the ‘sandwich structure’ is also a key factor to affect the pore morphology. In last few weeks I deposited five wafers with different bottom oxide thicknesses and they were 05/15/20, 10/15/20, 20/15/20, 40/15/20 and 100/15/20. Then I annealed them at 1000C for 1 minute with a 100C/s ramp rate….
Last few weeks, I deposited a couples of wafers to test the effect of oxide thickness on pores. In addition to previous data, I deposited another two wafers, one with 1nm top oxide and the other with 100nm top oxide. I summed up all data from the top oxide experiments. The first image is the…