Motivation

Remember that only limited researchers have access to high-end micro-/nanofabrication facilitates worldwide. Processes and materials we are currently relying on may not be the best out of available options. We look for better processes for conventional micro-/nanofabrication materials and better materials to realize high-performance transducers.

Research Interests

Large scale batch fabrication of nanostructures based on silicon self-assembly, Hydrogel based micro-/nanoelectromechanical systems, Materials and processing for flexible, stretchable, and wearable devices, Nanoscale 3D printing of organic and inorganic hybrids, 3D printing for biomedical applications, Multifunctional atomic force microscopy, Single molecule force/mass spectroscopy, High-precision Laser based manufacturing and metrology, Additive manufacturing, Heat transfer.

Current ongoing research topics

1. Manufacturing & Fabrication

a. Silicon-on-nothing and germanium-on-nothing technology

  • High temperature annealing based fabrication technology for silicon-on-nothing (SON) and germanium-on-nothing (GON) structure
  • Fabrication of silicon and germanium multi-layer structures in the wafer depth direction for MEMS/NEMS device applications

  • Hybrid annealing device for laser-based local and global annealing, allowing local morphological transformation in 10 μm resolution
  • Fabrication of a 3-dimensional cavity shape via combination with a laser scanning system

  • SON-based fabrication of nanoscale silicon oxide resonator with high-sensitivity and reduced processing steps compared to conventional fabrication methods
  • Application towards water-quality sensing (metal-ion sensor) and virus discrimination by accumulated or buoyant mass measurements

  • High throughput single crystalline silicon nanoparticle fabrication by wafer scale top-down annealing fabrication process
  • Resulting uniformly-sized silicon particles retain a form factor as small as 50 nm

  • Silicon thin film transfer technology for flexible and MEMS/NEMS device fabrication
  • Single crystalline silicon nanoparticle fabrication technology for energy and MEMS/NEMS device fabrication

2. Instrumentation

a. Resonator-based measurement

  • Heater-integrated fluidic resonator for thermophysical properties measurements with the aid of fast/precise/efficient temperature control of a few-pL of gas or liquid phase samples.

  • Functionalized microchannels for selective measurement of a specific ionic targets

b. Sub-surface imaging

  • Near-infrared interference microscope for non-destructive thickness measurement of multilayer thin film cavity structures, up to thickness of 1 𝜇m
  • Expanded measurement range in horizontal / vertical direction in combination with an atomic force microscopy

  • Machine learning-based methodology for a non-destructive and high-throughput inspection scheme to analyze sub-surface morphology from surface nanographs

  • Multi-domain autoencoder trained to produce nanoscale topography from OM images
  • Accomplishment of three separate objectives using different components of the same deep learning model

Press releases