News & Events

BSAC Researcher Seminar: Chip-Scale Fluorescence Imager for In Vivo Microscopic Cancer Detection

November 14, 2017
Efthymois Phillip Papageorgiou Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, UC Berkeley BSAC Graduate Researcher, Bernhard Boser Group November 14, 2017 | 12:00 to 01:00 | 490 Cory Hall Host: Michael Cable

Modern cancer treatment faces the pervasive challenge of identifying microscopic cancer foci in vivo, but no imaging device exists with the ability to identify these cells intraoperatively, where they can be removed. The removal of these foci is known to more than halve cancer recurrence rates across a wide variety of cancers, including...

Lin Lab: With a Damp TV, Berkeley Engineers Demonstrate the Potential of a Green Energy Harvester

September 6, 2021
William Schulz

Watching television in the shower might not rank terribly high on the scale of today’s available personal-tech indulgences. But imagine if the TV — or other small electronic device — was powered by water vapor billowing up from the marble floor tiles.

Such moisture-induced energy harvesting is what UC Berkeley researchers, led by mechanical engineering professor Liwei Lin, report in a study published today in Nature Communications They say it is a potential new source of green energy, particularly in...

Lin Lab: Slicing the Way to Wearable Sensor Prototypes

February 11, 2022
Alan S. Brown

Engineers at UC Berkeley have developed a new technique for making wearable sensors that enables medical researchers to prototype test new designs much faster and at a far lower cost than existing methods.

The new technique replaces photolithography — a multistep process used to make computer chips in clean rooms — with a $200 vinyl cutter. The novel approach slashes the time to make small batches of sensors by nearly 90% while cutting costs by almost 75%, said Renxiao Xu (Ph.D.’20 ME), who developed the...

BSAC Researcher Seminar: The Birth of BSAC and the March of MEMS

June 13, 2017
Prof. Richard S. Muller BSAC Co-Founder June 13, 2017 | 12:00 to 01:00 | 540 Cory Hall Host: Michael Cable

Inspired by success creating the first microelectromechanical systems using the processes and materials developed in the progress of integrated circuits, in 1986 Prof. Muller and Prof. Richard White founded the Berkeley Sensor & Actuator Center (BSAC) with the mission to conceive, design, and build integrated...

BSAC Seminar: Silicon-Based Integrated Sensors and Systems with On-Chip Antennas From Picosecond Pulse Radiators to Miniaturized Spectrometers

April 15, 2017
Prof. Aydin Babakhani Rice University, Directory of Rice Integrated Systems and Circuits Lab (RISC), Louis Owen Junior Chair Assistant Professor of ECE April 25, 2017 | 12:00 to 01:00 | 540 Cory Hall Host: Bernhard Boser

Today's silicon process technology makes it possible to integrate everything from antennas to processors on a single chip at almost no cost. This creates new opportunities for implementing complex sensors and systems on a millimeter scale. To create such devices, an understanding of physics, waves, electromagnetics,...

BSAC Seminar: Designing Functional Organic Nanomaterials for Advanced Energy Technologies

April 4, 2017
Dr. Guihua Yu University of Texas at Austin, Assistant Professor of Material Science and Engineering, Texas Materials Institute April 4, 2017 | 12:00 to 01:00 | 540 Cory Hall Host: Liwei Lin

Nanostructured materials have become critically important in many areas of technology ranging from renewable energy, electronics, and photonics, to biology and medicine, because of their unusual physical/chemical properties due to confined dimensions of such materials. This talk will present a new class of polymeric materials we developed recently: nanostructured conducting...

BSAC Seminar: Exosome Cancer Research Powered by Microfluidics

February 21, 2017
Prof. Mei He Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering, Kansas State University Nanotechnology Innovation Center Berkeley Postdoc 2011, Amy Herr Group February 21, 2017 | 12:00 to 01:00 | 490 Cory Hall Host: Liwei Lin

Most eukaryotic cells release exosomes that are membrane vesicles derived from the endolysosomal pathway with a size range of ~30-150 nm. Exosomes play important biological roles via transferring selectively enriched proteins, RNAs, and mitochondrial DNA, which presents distinctive opportunities for liquid biopsy analysis of cancers....

BSAC Seminar: A Novel Approach for High Efficient Electrostatic Micro/Nano Transducers

February 7, 2017
Dr. Harald Schenk Director, Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems Professor of Micro- and Nanosystems, Brandenburg University of Technology February 7, 2017 | 12:00 to 01:00 | 490 Cory Hall Host: Michael Cable

Electrostatic forces provide excellent scaling behavior that makes them first choice for micro and nano actuation. However, large stroke is at cost of large electrode gaps preventing to make use of this advantage. As a consequence, other driving mechanisms like piezoelectricity or electromagnetism are applied - although...

BSAC Seminar: Dynamic Characterization of MEMS Using Laser Doppler Vibrometry

April 11, 2017
Eric Lawrence MEMS Business Development Manager, Polytec Inc. April 11, 2017 | 12:00 to 01:00 | 540 Cory Hall Host: Michael Cable

Laser Doppler Vibrometry (LDV) is a technology widely used by research institutions for dynamic characterization of MEMS. This technique features microscope-based velocity measurements using the Doppler effect and has unique features in comparison to other available techniques. LDV offers high resolution down to the picometer level, bandwidth to 1.2 GHz, high accuracy, and wide dynamic range. Extension of this technique to...

BSAC Seminar: III-V Quantum Structures for Infrared Detection

September 5, 2017
Dr. Sarath Gunapala Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Infrared Photonics Group September 5, 2017 | 12:00 to 01:00 | 531 Cory Hall Host: Ming Wu

There are many applications that require long wavelength, large, uniform, reproducible, low cost, stable, and radiation-hard infrared (IR) focal plane arrays (FPAs). For example, the absorption lines of many gas molecules, such as ozone, water, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide occur in the wavelength region from 3 to 15 microns. Thus, IR imaging systems that operate in the long...