W613: Retest of Stability in Cell Culture Media
I recently repeated a chemical stability test of RTPed (5 min in Ar at 800C) samples from W613, which has the 30 nm pnc-Si layer. In this study I used DMEM +10% FBS as the culture media without cells. Previously RTP treatment of samples from this wafer survived about 7 days. In this iteration of the experiment discoloration was seen by 43 hours. This is much faster than seen earlier, and I am unsure why it happened. It may be possible that the RTPed samples somehow degraded since being RTPed (they were RTPed 8 days before this experiment started). I plan on repeating this study with the upcoming new wafers that have varying pnc-Si thicknesses to obtain a more comprehensive idea of the difference in chemical stability for varying pnc-Si thickness.
I also attempted to track the stability of the membranes in DMEM without cells. However during handling 9 of 10 membranes failed. The single surviving membrane, which was an RTPed sample, failed between 43 and 113 hours. (I was gone for the weekend so I don’t have a tighter time frame of failure).