Liwei Lin (Advisor)

The long-term goal of the project is to create the magnetic shielding packaging for a micro-machined gyroscope using spin-polarized nuclei. The shield is to have an attenuation above 10 to the 6 and a small size of approximately one cubic centimeter volume while allowing signal transmission lines to communicate with outside world. This is accomplished with multiple layers of high permeability material such as nickel-iron alloy. Current work focuses on new methods of fabricating shielding devices and the exploration of additional shielding materials.

Project end date:...

Semiconductor nanowires have recently stimulated great interest due to their attractive and potentially very useful properties, originating from features such as carrier confinement, high surface to volume ratio, and morphology/crystal structure unique to their nanoscale dimension and bottom-up growth process. These properties lead to many possible applications such as room temperature ballistic conductors for high-frequency/high-powered integrated circuits, UV/visible/IR nanolasers and waveguides, as well as sensors for chemical and biological agents. The systematic assembly and...

Dielectrophoresis (DEP) is the translation of tiny particles, nanometer to micrometer scale, resulting from non-uniform electric fields. Particle motion is dictated by the complex permittivity of the particle, the complex permittivity of the carrier solution (e.g. aqueous buffer), and the local electric field gradient. DEP is an attractive microfluidic manipulation technique because electric fields can be used to exert forces on uncharged particles or biological organisms. DEP has been used in applications ranging from particle separation to bacteria characterization. Here we propose...

Tools for linking the environment (application/tester/customer system) with the micro world of a MEMS device are extremely limited. It has proven difficult to accurately predict package, tester, and circuit board interactions and results. Thus, this research aims (1) to explore the physics of micro/macro interfacial contacts/stresses in the back-end packaging process to the overall MEMS RF device performances, and (2) to develop models for stresses in packages with MEMS devices (including RF MEMS such as QFN, LGA, cavity packages, etc.) both in process and final product stages. The...