Here are some pictures of my workplace:
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| From 2010-07-02 |
Lunch area behind Kemper (engineering hall)
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| From 2010-07-10 |
My purpose is to make TEM slides (size: 2.6x2.6mm, 50um thin nitride window in the middle)
Currently I work in the cleanroom at UC Davis in the engineering building, Kemper. I started as a volunteer for the Northern CA Nanocenter (the people in charge of the cleanroom) at the start of my last quarter at UC Davis. They were going to hire me as a student assistant to help maintain the lab, but by the time they proposed the offer I had already graduated and wasn't a student, thus I obviously couldn't be a student assistant. But when that door closed another opened.
I now work for Professor James Evans, from the microbiology department, and my job is to help design, with a lot of help from the guy that got me the job Mike Irving, and fabricate TEM microscope slides in the cleanroom.
Most of my time is spent in the cleanroom creating the slides. In a nutshell I use the
photolithography process to create images on a silicon wafer, deposit metals, and then use potassium hydroxide and hydrofluoric acid to expose 50 nanometer thin nitride windows and free hundreds of little slides. Then I have to inspect all the slides, one by one, under an optical microscope. At their size (2x2 millimeter) static electricity and surface tension dominate. They will stick to any liquid and I've had some slides fly away when I try to pick them up in the wrong way. With all this work I've reached yields of 10%! And
only break about 1 out of 3 wafers.
This is only temp work and I will leave some time in September. That is after my lease ends... that should be interesting.
