I am developing a process for fabricating microporous Parylene Liftoff membranes. I am interested in these as a more flexible substrate for cell culturing.  Parylene is relatively strong (compared to say pdms), so it is feasible to work with lifted…

The NSF STTR phase I project officially ended last week, and we are writing the final report and preparing to submit a Phase II proposal.  I will attempt here to summarize the program achievements and list some of the persisting…

Josh Miller and Elizabeth Hirschman (RIT co-op student working on STTR lift-off project) obtained preliminary successful results lifting off ~1 in2 sections of NPN membrane where the nanopores were only transferred into the nitride layer in a microporous pattern (ø3…

Summary The CEIS project ended in June, and I am summarizing the last few weeks of activities below by Josh and me.  We did a little more work on reducing the SU-8 film stress through the processing conditions.  We also…

Summary:  Annealing to above glass transition T (200 C) doesn’t reduce film stress.  Adjusting post-exposure bake protocol seems to reduce it. A short post to document my efforts at reducing tensile stress in SU-8-3000 coatings by annealing in vacuum to…

Background Details: Josh Miller & I have made some recent progress in the NPN LO work.  We had several ø6″ wafers w/ 100 nm of thermal oxide processed by Rogue Valley, wherein they deposited 650 nm of poly-Si (LP-CDV) followed…

This is a summary I wrote ~3 weeks ago of the work Josh Miller and I are doing under the CEIS grant for NPN Lift-off. Summary: Josh and I have been working for about four weeks so far on this…

I attended the 2014 Gordon Research Conference (GRC) on Fuel Cells in August. For those of you not familiar with Gordon conferences, I will make a plug for them as a great venue for learning much detail and interacting closely…

I posted previously about an issue we have with needing to strip the native oxide from the sacrificial silicon layer prior to performing the through-pore etch with XeF2 that enables separation of the oxide membrane from the wafer substrate.  The…

Today, I finally demonstrated liftoff of microporous SiOx from a bare Si wafer.  The sample is a 2 x 2 cm section of wafer 209A02, which has a 100 nm layer of TEOS SiOx that stress stabilizing anneal.  The film…