[BNC-all] BNC E-news for the week of June 9th

[Anthrop, Heather L]

Survey Feedback
Tours

Survey Feedback
Cluttered Hoods

Users and staff members have commented that general hood clutter has been getting worse over the last several months.  Acid and solvent hoods in Bays S and K have been particularly bad and in some cases beakers have been in the hoods since November.  As a reminder, it is required by BNC policy that all experiments need to be labeled.  The labels are provided in the cleanroom so please make sure your experiments are properly noted, and that old experiments are removed in a timely fashion.

Hood in Bay S showing a clutter of chemical bottles and unlabeled experiments:

[cid:image001.jpg at 01CF8160.276D9410]

Panasonic

The Panasonic etcher has been down for a number of days due to vacuum and software issues.  Engineering staff members have been working every day to diagnose the root-cause of the problem.  While we wait for repair parts to arrive we are offering, on a limited basis for critical processing needs, the option of having Geoff Gardner perform manual processing with the system.  This requires Geoff to manually manipulate the entire process from loading wafers, to the etch process itself, to manually purging the chamber prior to unloading the wafers.  If you have an urgent, critical need for the Panasonic process please contact Geoff directly.  Thank you for your patience as we work to get the Panasonic completely repaired and returned to normal service.

Lesker & Leybold Evaporators

Both the Lesker and Leybold e-beam evaporators have been down due to power supply problems.  These problems manifested themselves at nearly the same time, and a grounding issue was suspected.  We hired an electrical consultant to come in and evaluate our equipment and building grounding scheme, and modifications to the grounds were recommended and completed.  Because the power supplies are high voltage and specialized, we've had to send them back to the factory for repair.  The Lesker supply has been repaired at the factory, and is being shipped back to  arrive next week.  The Leybold power supply is now undergoing diagnosis at the factory.  Thanks for your patience during this uncommon event of losing two high voltage power supplies at the same time.  Kenny and Dave have worked to reconfigure our remaining evaporators to provide processing needs.  Please see them if you have questions.

Electron-Beam Lithography

It has been suggested that we replace our Vistec VB6 with a Jeol 6300 due to the Jeol being more user-friendly.  This will have to go into our long-term equipment plans due to the expense of a new e-beam lithography system.  Typical new e-beam writers cost between $2M and $18M depending on their capability and throughput, and the Birck equipment replacement budget is significantly  less than $1M per year.  It is interesting to note that we did have a Jeol 6400 here in the cleanroom a number of years ago, but when the VB6 was purchased and installed the Jeol was never used again.  The Jeol was subsequently removed from the cleanroom and relocated to Armstrong to become a system in the SEM core.  It's writing capability was removed and it is now strictly an SEM.  Another option here at Birck to consider is the Raith e-beam lithography system in Lab 1239.  If users are interested in learning more about the Raith and its capability please contact Bill Rowe.

Tours
We will have several tours throughout the month of June.

Monday, June 9th
2:30 pm - 2 guests

Tuesday, June 10th
10:00 am - 100 guests (no this isn't a typo :))

Wednesday, June 11th
11:00 am - 16 guests

Thursday, June 12th
1:45 pm - 23 guests

Friday, June 13th
8:30 am - 17 guests
11:00 am -23 guests
3:00 pm - 15 guests

Thank you,

Heather L Anthrop

Purdue University
Birck Nanotechnology Center
1205 West State Street
West Lafayette, IN 47907
(765) 494-7053

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