Clean Room:

(left) ICP-RIE/PECVD system (right) SEM / e-beam writing system

We maintain and run our own class 10,000/1,000 clean room. The clean room consists of a gown-up vestibule, a 1000 sq. ft. main clean room area (class 10,000), a 400 sq. ft. lithography room (class 1,000), and several service chaises for utilities. Currently we have a field emission scanning electron microscope for imaging and e-beam writing (e-beam writer code originally written by Oliver Dial), a high-depositon rate PECVD for depositing high-quality SiOx, SiOxNy, and a-Si thin films, and an ICP-RIE system fitted with a wide temperature table (-180 deg. C to 400 deg. C) for etching of a variety of dielectric and semiconductor materials.

(left) Lithography room (right) ICP-RIE/PECVD service chaise.

Optical and Electrical Test Lab:

The test lab is furnished with several optical tables which house various experiments. A micro-photoluminescence (PL) set-up is currently used to investigate the emission characteristics of novel photonic crystal (PC) lasers and LEDs. Other experimental set-ups in this lab include a fiber taper pulling rig and a fiber taper optical probe for characterizing photonic crystal waveguides and passive resonant cavities.

Beowulf Cluster:

In order to perform a number of different types of numerical electromagnetic simulations, we have put together a small (15 computer) cluster of off-the-shelf computers which are networked together with a high-speed switch. The PCs are outfitted with dual P-IIIs (800 MHz) and 1 GB of RAM. We use a modified version of finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) code first written by Brian D'Urso (as an undergraduate SURF) to do many of our electromagnetic simulations.

Slightly cannibalized beowulf cluster (additional computers reside in various student offices).

Watson Building Shared Clean Room:

Recently, the Division of Engineering and Applied Science has built a shared clean room facility (1500 sq. ft. of class 10,000 space) which contains photolithography facilities (mask aligner and spinner), several fume hoods for wet chemistry, a thermal evaporator for depositing Au, Cr, and other easily deposiuted metals, and several ovens for baking and curing of polymers.