Ultra High-Tech Equipment Enables Nano Research
Maintaining leading-edge equipment and infrastructure is key in NC State’s effort to achieve prominence in nanotechnology research. The molecular dimensions of materials and concepts being tested rule out using yesterday’s basic laboratory equipment to measure and analyze outcomes. Getting a close-up view of the structure and elemental constituents of materials requires high powered tools that many researchers can share. NC State is committed to expanding its current capacity to serve research needs into the future.
“Analytical instrumentation is an enabling technology for nanotechnology research. If you can’t examine what you’ve made, you don’t know what you’ve created.”
The Analytical Instrumentation Facility (AIF), which dates to 1923 and was originally known as Engineering Research Services, performs microscopy, elemental, and surface analysis of materials using instruments like electron microscopes, secondary ion mass spectrometers, and scanning probe microscopes. “Anyone who needs a nanoscale analysis of a material comes to us,” AIF Director Dieter Griffis says. “We’re materials detectives, trying to learn things from examining materials.” The operation’s five-person staff works with researchers to design experiments and interpret data, and they also perform analytical technique development research to try to extend the instruments’ capabilities. They have developed, for example, a method of probing semiconductor wafers for impurities from the back side, a technique being adopted by Intel Corp. and other manufacturers.
“We’re materials detectives.”
“Analytical instrumentation is an enabling technology for nanotechnology research,” says Griffis. “If you can’t examine what you’ve made, you don’t know what you’ve created.”
One of the goals of the Nanotechnology Initiative is to expand the access of the AIF and other user facilities on campus to the research community and local industry. Griffis comments, “We are continually seeking creative means for AIF to maintain the most state-of-the-art technology.”
Also located on Centennial Campus, the Triangle National Lithography Center (TNLC), jointly owned by NC State and UNC-Chapel Hill, has a state-of-the-art machine in its 193-nanometer scanner, which uses deep ultraviolet light to create semiconductors, optical devices, sensors, and other materials at nanoscale dimensions. The TNLC, the AIF, and NC State’s Nanofabrication Facility (NNF), which provides film deposition, etching, and other services in a series of clean rooms in the Monteith Research Center, provide unparalleled opportunities for nanoscience and nanotechnology research, says Dr. Carlton Osburn, an electrical engineering professor who heads both TNLC and NNF. “We exist to help the faculty make whatever they need to make,” he says, “and we’ll grow and evolve with the University’s nanotechnology research.”
http://www.tnlc.ncsu.edu/pages/index_tnlc.htm
