Implantable Kidney

Even though we don’t have defect free membranes, I wanted to tweak the gold setup using membranes with pinholes. Previously I was using the small scale diffusion chamber that I use for protein separations. This setup has a retentate of 2-3 uL and a filtrate of 60 uL. To do particle sizing using the Malvern…

I tested those membranes from w335 and w341 with approximately 40 nm of deposited oxide on both sides for air permeability and burst pressures. There was tiny amount of air flow (I checked for leak) from few of them which I didn’t expect with such thick oxide. The burst pressures are higher then without the…

Today I etched wafer 621, which is the pair to 620.  While w620 has a relatively low pinhole density, w621 shows a much higher occurence of defects. Since the front-end processing and thermal treatment was identical for these wafers, I believe that the variability lies in the etch process.  Looking at the two wafers side-by-side,…

Over the last week, I’ve run a discoloration assay similar to one run a while back (Barrett’s post here). It was demonstrated in a subsequent paper (Agrawal2010) that annealing the pnc-Si films prevents discoloration of the membrane, which he tied to the nanomembrane remaining intact. I was given a few chips from the recent TEOS lot,…

Six wafers (385-390) were produced last week with the new Solaris 150 RTP system. Good news: We now have much better control/feedback compared to the RIT setup. There are two thermlecouples on the wafer tray that monitors the front and back portion of the wafer. The new unit allows us to independently modify the front/back/bottom…