I have been exploring the efficacy of different methods for removing the native oxide from the surface of the sacrificial silicon layer prior to liftoff etch with XeF2. As a reminder, with liftoff of SiN membranes, one can simply dip the sample in BOE solution for a few seconds to strip the native oxide. This…
SiMPore submitted a Phase I SBIR proposal to NSF for liftoff of microporous silicon oxide and nanoporous nitride. This is a resubmission of the NSF Nanomanufacturing proposal that Tom and Bob submitted last Oct. and just heard last week that it was declined. That proposal was liftoff of nanoporous membranes using inorganic scaffold materials. Several…
Kelly & I deposited 100 & 300 nm thick SiO2 films on bare wafers with the P5000 PE-CVD tool at RIT last week. The wafers were then annealed according to JP’s recipe overnight to stabilize the TEOS layer film stress. The stress was measured using the Tencor P2 profilometer by scanning across it before depositing…
We were targeting a TEOS layer of 300 nm for the SiO2 membrane. The wafers were patterned with ø3 µm pores using S1813 resist (~1.5 µm thick). The target etch time in the Drytek RIE is 4 min 10 s using SF6 and Ar. We will need a thicker resist coating to prevent the RIE…
I am planning to write a proposal to the NIST Measurement Science and Engineering (MSE) Research Grant Program. Federal Funding Opportunity (FFO) is here. The proposal is due in the beginning of June. From talking with a friend at RIT would has one of these presently, it sounds like the best strategy is to target an…
I submitted a proposal last week with Tom & I as co-PI’s to NSF’s Process Reaction Engineering division in CBET. Novel Catalytic Membrane Reactor Based on Ultra-thin Palladium Film Supported on Nano-structured Inorganic Membrane I’m attaching the intro. paragraph and a couple of the figures to give a general idea of what the proposal is…
Kelly & I finally succeeded in getting a measurement of the SU-8 scaffold change in size upon liftoff. Kelly, lifted off a sample (~0.5 x 2 cm) using the XeF2 dry etch and transferred the sample to a glass slide with pdms bonded to it. The slide was then placed on top of the printed…
SU-8 3010 has been used to create a scaffold in the fabrication of the liftoff membranes. The supplier of the negative resist, MicroChem, rates it for a 13 moth shelf life. We were having difficulty achieving good liftoff with membranes in the second half of last year. The SU-8 had expired by several months, so…
I tested all the microbeads that the Gaborski and Lapizco-Encinas labs own. The results are summarized below. The sizes ranged from 50 nm to 2 µm. I mixed them to concentrations of 0.2 g/L for all bead less than 1 µm and 1.0 g/L for all 1 µm or greater. Interestingly, the scans look rather…
Blanca, Tom, Aytug and I are working on a proposal to NSF that will be submitted Oct.29th to the Chem. & Bio. Separations Program of the CBET division. This is a joint 3-year project between Blanca’s and Tom’s labs. Basically, we are combining Blanca’s insultator-dielectrophoresis with the microporous version of the SiO2 (or SiN) ultrathin…
