scholarly journals Integration of sharp silicon nitride tips into high-speed SU8 cantilevers in a batch fabrication process

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 2357-2363 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nahid Hosseini ◽  
Matthias Neuenschwander ◽  
Oliver Peric ◽  
Santiago H Andany ◽  
Jonathan D Adams ◽  
...  

Employing polymer cantilevers has shown to outperform using their silicon or silicon nitride analogues concerning the imaging speed of atomic force microscopy (AFM) in tapping mode (intermittent contact mode with amplitude modulation) by up to one order of magnitude. However, tips of the cantilever made out of a polymer material do not meet the requirements for tip sharpness and durability. Combining the high imaging bandwidth of polymer cantilevers with making sharp and wear-resistant tips is essential for a future adoption of polymer cantilevers in routine AFM use. In this work, we have developed a batch fabrication process to integrate silicon nitride tips with an average tip radius of 9 ± 2 nm into high-speed SU8 cantilevers. Key aspects of the process are the mechanical anchoring of a moulded silicon nitride tip and a two-step release process. The fabrication recipe can be adjusted to any photo-processable polymer cantilever.

Author(s):  
Kwangseok Hwang ◽  
Kyeongtae Kim ◽  
Jaehoon Chung ◽  
Ohmyoung Kwon ◽  
Byeonghee Lee ◽  
...  

To guarantee the reproducibility, uniformity and high yield of the fabrication results even with the unavoidable disturbances during the process, the robustness of the batch fabrication process of SThM probes has been improved. First, the shape of the hard mask used for the anisotropic tip etching was redesigned to fit to certain crystal surfaces of silicon wafer so that the sharpness of the tip is kept for a while even after the hard mask falls apart during the bulk tip etch process. Second, the aspect ratio of the tip was maximized by utilizing high concentration KOH solution. Third, the uniformity of etch rate across the wafer was improved by using ultrasonic bath during the anisotropic wet tip etching step. Through the synergistic effects of the modifications of the key steps, the tip fabrication process has become very robust and uniform. Taking advantage of the robustness of the process, we reduced the tip radius of the SThM probe down to 50 nm and the diameter of the thermocouple junction located at the end of the tip to 100 nm. As a result, the sensitivity and the spatial resolution of the new probe were demonstrated to be improved more than two times.


Materials ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (13) ◽  
pp. 3464
Author(s):  
Xuan Zou ◽  
Jingyuan Zhou ◽  
Xianwen Ran ◽  
Yiting Wu ◽  
Ping Liu ◽  
...  

Recent studies have shown that the energy release capacity of Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE)/Al with Si, and CuO, respectively, is higher than that of PTFE/Al. PTFE/Al/Si/CuO reactive materials with four proportions of PTFE/Si were designed by the molding–sintering process to study the influence of different PTFE/Si mass ratios on energy release. A drop hammer was selected for igniting the specimens, and the high-speed camera and spectrometer systems were used to record the energy release process and the flame spectrum, respectively. The ignition height of the reactive material was obtained by fitting the relationship between the flame duration and the drop height. It was found that the ignition height of PTFE/Al/Si/CuO containing 20% PTFE/Si is 48.27 cm, which is the lowest compared to the ignition height of other Si/PTFE ratios of PTFE/Al/Si/CuO; the flame temperature was calculated from the flame spectrum. It was found that flame temperature changes little for the same reactive material at different drop heights. Compared with the flame temperature of PTFE/Al/Si/CuO with four mass ratios, it was found that the flame temperature of PTFE/Al/Si/CuO with 20% PTFE/Si is the highest, which is 2589 K. The results show that PTFE/Al/Si/CuO containing 20% PTFE/Si is easier to be ignited and has a stronger temperature destruction effect.


Author(s):  
Janik Schaude ◽  
Maxim Fimushkin ◽  
Tino Hausotte

AbstractThe article presents a redesigned sensor holder for an atomic force microscope (AFM) with an adjustable probe direction, which is integrated into a nano measuring machine (NMM-1). The AFM, consisting of a commercial piezoresistive cantilever operated in closed-loop intermitted contact-mode, is based on two rotational axes, which enable the adjustment of the probe direction to cover a complete hemisphere. The axes greatly enlarge the metrology frame of the measuring system by materials with a comparatively high coefficient of thermal expansion. The AFM is therefore operated within a thermostating housing with a long-term temperature stability of 17 mK. The sensor holder, connecting the rotational axes and the cantilever, inserted one adhesive bond, a soldered connection and a geometrically undefined clamping into the metrology circle, which might also be a source of measurement error. It has therefore been redesigned to a clamped senor holder, which is presented, evaluated and compared to the previous glued sensor holder within this paper. As will be shown, there are no significant differences between the two sensor holders. This leads to the conclusion, that the three aforementioned connections do not deteriorate the measurement precision, significantly. As only a minor portion of the positioning range of the piezoelectric actuator is needed to stimulate the cantilever near its resonance frequency, a high-speed closed-loop control that keeps the cantilever within its operating range using this piezoelectric actuator further on as actuator was implemented and is presented within this article.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 362
Author(s):  
Luke Oduor Otieno ◽  
Bernard Ouma Alunda ◽  
Jaehyun Kim ◽  
Yong Joong Lee

A high-speed atomic force microscope (HS-AFM) requires a specialized set of hardware and software and therefore improving video-rate HS-AFMs for general applications is an ongoing process. To improve the imaging rate of an AFM, all components have to be carefully redesigned since the slowest component determines the overall bandwidth of the instrument. In this work, we present a design of a compact HS-AFM scan-head featuring minimal loading on the Z-scanner. Using a custom-programmed controller and a high-speed lateral scanner, we demonstrate its working by obtaining topographic images of Blu-ray disk data tracks in contact- and tapping-modes. Images acquired using a contact-mode cantilever with a natural frequency of 60 kHz in constant deflection mode show good tracking of topography at 400 Hz. In constant height mode, tracking of topography is demonstrated at rates up to 1.9 kHz for the scan size of 1μm×1μm with 100×100 pixels.


Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (21) ◽  
pp. 6387 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaohan Tu ◽  
Cheng Xu ◽  
Siping Liu ◽  
Shuai Lin ◽  
Lipei Chen ◽  
...  

As overhead contact (OC) is an essential part of power supply systems in high-speed railways, it is necessary to regularly inspect and repair abnormal OC components. Relative to manual inspection, applying LiDAR (light detection and ranging) to OC inspection can improve efficiency, accuracy, and safety, but it faces challenges to efficiently and effectively segment LiDAR point cloud data and identify catenary components. Recent deep learning-based recognition methods are rarely employed to recognize OC components, because they have high computational complexity, while their accuracy needs to be improved. To track these problems, we first propose a lightweight model, RobotNet, with depthwise and pointwise convolutions and an attention module to recognize the point cloud. Second, we optimize RobotNet to accelerate its recognition speed on embedded devices using an existing compilation tool. Third, we design software to facilitate the visualization of point cloud data. Our software can not only display a large amount of point cloud data, but also visualize the details of OC components. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RobotNet recognizes OC components more accurately and efficiently than others. The inference speed of the optimized RobotNet increases by an order of magnitude. RobotNet has lower computational complexity than other studies. The visualization results also show that our recognition method is effective.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcus H. Hansen ◽  
Anita T. Simonsen ◽  
Hans B. Ommen ◽  
Charlotte G. Nyvold

AbstractBackgroundRapid and practical DNA-sequencing processing has become essential for modern biomedical laboratories, especially in the field of cancer, pathology and genetics. While sequencing turn-over time has been, and still is, a bottleneck in research and diagnostics, the field of bioinformatics is moving at a rapid pace – both in terms of hardware and software development. Here, we benchmarked the local performance of three of the most important Spark-enabled Genome analysis toolkit 4 (GATK4) tools in a targeted sequencing workflow: Duplicate marking, base quality score recalibration (BQSR) and variant calling on targeted DNA sequencing using a modest hyperthreading 12-core single CPU and a high-speed PCI express solid-state drive.ResultsCompared to the previous GATK version the performance of Spark-enabled BQSR and HaplotypeCaller is shifted towards a more efficient usage of the available cores on CPU and outperforms the earlier GATK3.8 version with an order of magnitude reduction in processing time to analysis ready variants, whereas MarkDuplicateSpark was found to be thrice as fast. Furthermore, HaploTypeCallerSpark and BQSRPipelineSpark were significantly faster than the equivalent GATK4 standard tools with a combined ∼86% reduction in execution time, reaching a median rate of ten million processed bases per second, and duplicate marking was reduced ∼42%. The called variants were found to be in close agreement between the Spark and non-Spark versions, with an overall concordance of 98%. In this setup, the tools were also highly efficient when compared execution on a small 72 virtual CPU/18-node Google Cloud cluster.ConclusionIn conclusion, GATK4 offers practical parallelization possibilities for DNA sequence processing, and the Spark-enabled tools optimize performance and utilization of local CPUs. Spark utilizing GATK variant calling is several times faster than previous GATK3.8 multithreading with the same multi-core, single CPU, configuration. The improved opportunities for parallel computations not only hold implications for high-performance cluster, but also for modest laboratory or research workstations for targeted sequencing analysis, such as exome, panel or amplicon sequencing.


2012 ◽  
Vol 56 (04) ◽  
pp. 207-214
Author(s):  
Brandon M. Taravella ◽  
William S. Vorus

T. Francis Ogilvie (1972) developed a Green's function method for calculating the wave profile of slender ships with fine bows. He recognized that near a slender ship's bow, rates of change of flow variables axially should be greater than those typically assumed in slender body theory. Ogilvie's result is still a slender body theory in that the rates of change in the near field are different transversely (a half-order different) than axially; however, the difference in order of magnitude between them is less than in the usual slender body theory. Typical of slender body theory, this formulation results in a downstream stepping solution (along the ship's length) in which downstream effects are not reflected upstream. Ogilvie, however, developed a solution only for wedge-shaped bodies. Taravella, Vorus, and Givan (2010) developed a general solution to Ogilvie's formulation for arbitrary slender ships. In this article, the general solution has been expanded for use on moderate to high-speed ships. The wake trench has been accounted for. The results for wave resistance have been calculated and are compared with previously published model test data.


Proceedings ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (13) ◽  
pp. 776 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bogdan F. Spiridon ◽  
Peter H. Griffin ◽  
John C. Jarman ◽  
Yingjun Liu ◽  
Tongtong Zhu ◽  
...  

This study focuses on the thermal characterization of porous gallium nitride (GaN) usingan extended 3ω method. Porous semiconductor materials provide a solution to the need for on-chipthermal insulation, a fundamental requirement for low-power, high-speed and high-accuracythermal sensors. Thermal insulation is especially important in GaN devices, due to the intrinsicallyhigh thermal conductivity of the material. The results show one order of magnitude reduction inthermal conductivity, from 130 W/mK to 10 W/mK, in line with theoretical predictions for porousmaterials. This achievement is encouraging in the quest for integrating sensors with opto-, powerandRF-electronics on a single GaN chip.


2014 ◽  
Vol 658 ◽  
pp. 339-344
Author(s):  
Viorel Paleu ◽  
Ioan Damian ◽  
Cristel Stirbu

To monitor the friction torque evolution in tandems of angular contact ball bearings, a new testing device is developed. New partial hybrid bearings from 7206C series are obtained by combining 8 steel balls with 4 silicon nitride balls of the same diameter equally spaced in the cage, these bearings being denoted hereafter as 8S-4C type. For comparison, tests are carried-out also on conventional all-steel bearings and hybrid bearings with all the steel balls replaced by silicon nitride balls. The equilibrium temperature of the all-steel, hybrid and 8S-4C ball bearings is determined by tests. At high speed and light axial load, the 8S-4C ball bearings withstand to an oil shut-off test of one minute, while the similar all-steel bearings seized. The 8S-4C partial hybrid ball bearings can be an advantageous solution comparative to more expensive all hybrid bearings, avoiding the scuffing due to the self-healing effect induced by the higher hardness of the silicon nitride balls.


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