Lending Library

Facility Director

songi [at] chem [dot] ucsb [dot] edu (Professor Song-I Han)

Technical Director

jghu [at] mrl [dot] ucsb [dot] edu (Dr. Jerry Hu)

Email: jghu-at-mrl.ucsb.edu
Phone (office): (805) 893-7914
Phone (lab): (805) 893-7940

Lab Technician

jaya [at] mrl [dot] ucsb [dot] edu (Jaya Nolt)

Email: jaya-at-mrl.ucsb.edu
Phone: (805) 893-4997

NMR Specialist

shamonwalker [at] mrl [dot] ucsb [dot] edu (Shamon Walker)

Email: shamonwalker-at-mrl.ucsb.edu
Phone: (805) 893-6079

Spectroscopy Facility Help

If you have questions, issues or comments please email us at nmrhelp [at] mrl [dot] ucsb [dot] edu (nmrhelp)

Our 5,000-square-foot clean room is used by Princeton University students, faculty, staff, and other researchers to fabricate semiconductor, microfluidic, and MEMS devices. The laboratory consists of class 1000 rooms for deposition and etch, a class 100 room for lithography, a separate electron beam lithography cleanroom, a lapping/polishing lab, and a packaging lab.

A special strength of the lab is the ability to handle a wide variety of substrates in our tools, from the usual III-V and silicon semiconductor substrates to the more unusual glass, metal, and plastic foils used in novel flexible electronics applications. Substrate sizes range from a few square mm InP to 150 mm diameter Si wafers.

The lab has a complete range of fabrication tools, including:

• Thin-film formation techniques, such as conventional and plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition, thermal and electron-beam evaporators, metal and dielectric sputterers, and high-temperature diffusion and oxidation.
• Pattern transfer by plasma etching, with 6 reactors dedicated to etching a wide range of materials including thin film dielectrics, GaAs, InP and related compounds, Si and SiGe. The laboratory recently installed a Deep Si etch tool for MEMS and biofluidic device fabrication.
• Lithography with contact printers, a photomask generator, a nanoimprinter and an electron beam writer.

This innovative facility is based on a 3rd-generation Model 930 system design from EPI and custom-designed processing chambers connected in vacuo with the deposition system. It is directed by Beresford. The EPI 930, with cryo and ion pumping, full cryo-shrouds, and water-cooled thermal shields, achieves base pressures of about 8 × 10–11 torr and produces high-quality III-V arsenide and nitride layers. The system includes a valved As cracker that permits precise mechanical control of the As2 or As4 flux and dual-filament Ga and In cells, whose "hot lip" design helps minimize defect densities in the films. A 200-amu range quadrupole mass spectrometer, 10-kV RHEED gun and 1-µm narrow-band optical pyrometer are in-process diagnostic tools. Upgrades include customized ECR and rf plasma nitrogen sources. A novel multi-beam optical stress sensor (MOSS) mounts on the center viewport of the source flange and provides real-time measurements of the wafer curvature due to stress generated by heteroepitaxial growth. The substrates can be loaded in stress-free mounts such that they are free to deform when mismatched epitaxial layers are grown. The use of multiple parallel optical beams affords noise immunity such that a radius of curvature of 40 km can be detected, sufficient for detection of monolayer films. An atomic hydrogen source enables low-temperature oxide desorption cleaning, which is critical for preparing engineered nanoscale surfaces for the pattern-driven growth of quantum structures. The average cost of 1 day of operations is ~$120 (excluding any personnel or substrate costs), covering liquid nitrogen, source materials, miscellaneous lab supplies, and routine costs of maintenance/repair of the MBE components and system.

We have three inverted microscopes (Nikon TE-2000) and one upright microscope (Nikon Microphot-SA) equipped with high performance water and oil immersion lenses. There are three complimentary cooled CCD cameras for low-light fluorescence imaging (Andor iXon, QImaging Retiga and two Photometrics CoolSnap HQ). All the microscopes can operate in brightfield, DIC and fluorescence modes. One microscope is equipped with a motorized XYZ stage and shutters, allowing for long time lapse measurements. In addition one of the microscopes has a multi-beam laser tweezer (1064 nm 1W, Nd:YAG) capable of trapping dozens of beads. There is a separate detection laser (830 nm, 10 mW) which is used conjunction with a quadrant photodiode and low noise differential amplifier to detect a position of a trapped bead with nanometer precision and microsecond time resolution. The instrument is capable of operating in constant force mode, where the position of the trap is constantly adjusted to keep the force on a bead constant. In addition, we have constructed a novel single-molecule fluorescence microscope capable of efficiently detecting and colocalizing multiple components within a macromolecular complex when each component is labeled using a different color fluorescent dye. In this through-objective excitation, total internal reflection instrument, the dichroic mirror conventionally used to spectrally segregate the excitation and emission pathways was replaced with small broadband mirrors. This design spatially segregates the excitation and emission pathways and thereby permits efficient collection of the spectral range of emitted fluorescence when three or more dyes are used. This facility is equipped with a low light high sensitivity electron multiplying CCD (Andor iXon). The available excitation wavelengths are 488nm, 532 nm and 633nm.

This facility is equipped for the metallographic preparation of specimens by producing strain-free surfaces usually examined by optical microscopy. Other applications of mechanically polished specimens involve producing strain-fee (surface) tensile specimens, optically flat electrodes, and flat substrates for subsequent thin-film depositions. Both transmitted light and reflected light metallographs are available for photomicrography and microstructural characterizations. The Lab Manager is available for consultation and training.

The Penn State Nanofabrication Facility (Nanofab) is a fully staffed user research facility that enables fabrication and characterization of a wide range of devices to support fundamental and applied research in diverse fields spanning electronics to medicine. Over 400 researchers from Penn State, other universities, government labs, and industry take advantage of the expertise and world-class facilities of The Nanofabrication Laboratory. The Facility has cross disciplinary expertise in the areas of spectroscopy, biology, chemistry, physics, optics, electrical engineering, and engineering science.

The Nanofab provides specialized instruments and technical support in areas that mirror our faculty research strengths, including chemical and molecular-scale nanotechnology; electronics, optics, and MEMS; materials and physical sciences; and education. The technical staff have made significant progress in transitioning nanoscale materials synthesis, chemical and molecular film patterning and deposition, complex ferroelectric oxide thin film deposition, and device fabrication processes from leading PSU research centers and faculty labs to the open-access user facility.

For users, the Nanofab provides the opportunity to do hands on research with some of the world's most sophisticated instruments for the fabrication and characterization of materials at the micro and nanoscale.

Instrumentation:
Deposition and Growth
https://www.mri.psu.edu/nanofabrication-lab/capabilities/deposition-and-...

Etching
https://www.mri.psu.edu/nanofabrication-lab/capabilities/etching-0

Characterization
https://www.mri.psu.edu/nanofabrication-lab/capabilities/characterization-0

Lithography
https://www.mri.psu.edu/nanofabrication-lab/capabilities/lithography-0

The OIM consists of a Philips XL40 FEGSEM, equipped with a large specimen chamber and a Peltier cooled CCD camera for acquisition of electron backscattering patterns. The camera mount has also been upgraded to a stepper motor driven screw drive, allowing the camera position to be controlled to meet the diffraction requirements of the experiment. Recently, provisions for fitting a hot stage to run in-situ annealing and orientation data acquisition experiments have been implemented, and have been preliminarily successful. Data collection is provided by commercial OIM software acquired from TSL, and runs on a windows PC workstation. The OIM is part of the Earl and Mary Roberts Materials Characterization Laboratory that houses the department's X-ray and microscopy facilities. The MCL also contains a classroom from which students can remotely control the microscopes.

The MRSEC computational facilities are part of the Brandeis High Performance Computational Cluster (HPCC). HPCC is comprised of approximately 155 computational nodes each of which has 8 or 12 cores ranging in clock speed from 2.50 GHz to 3.16 GHz. In addition, 5 nodes of the cluster are connected to 12 NVIDIA GPUs. HPCC has about 36 TB of storage. The cluster uses customized Rocks cluster software with 64-bit Linux. The MRSEC has priority ownership of 23 of the nodes, and low priority access to the remaining nodes.

The microfluidic facility has been completed. Work included renovation of the room, purchase of a Leica motorized fluorescent microscope with Metamorph control and analysis station, and acquisition of pumping equipment. A station for measurements of surface tensions at liquid-liquid interfaces has been designed and built. The microfluidics facility now includes equipment dedicated to characterization and operation of microfluidic channels and networks. This will include equipment for measuring fluid viscosities, liquid/liquid and liquid/surface interfacial energies, as well as set-ups for pressure-driven fluid pumping. Quantitative fluorescence optical measurements of millisecond kinetics on microfluidic chips are possible with a high-numerical aperture compound microscope. A fluorescent stereomicroscope for slower sub-second kinetics, and for evaluation of protein assays developed in IRG 4 is also available.