News & Events

BSAC Seminar: Hard-boiled Electrons: Using Thermionic Emission for Solar Energy Generation

February 15, 2011
Dr. Igor Bargatin Department of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University Postdoctoral Researcher February 15, 2011 | 12:00 to 01:00 | 540 Cory Hall, DOP Center Conference Room Host: Roya Maboudian

An interdisciplinary team of Stanford researchers is currently building MEMS-based prototypes of new heat-to-electricity and solar-to-electricity energy converters. The first type of device converts very high temperature heat (>1000 C) to electricity via the evaporation of electrons from solid surfaces (thermionic effect). The second device simultaneously...

BSAC Seminar: High Temperature Bonding Technology for SiC Devices

October 25, 2011
Torleif Tollefsen SINTEF & Vestfold University College, Norway October 25, 2011 | 12:00 to 01:00 | 540 Cory Hall, DOP Center Conference Room Host: Debbie Senesky

Au-Sn solid-liquid-interdiffusion (SLID) bonding is a novel and promising interconnect technology for high temperature (HT) applications. In combination with Silicon Carbide (SiC) devices, Au-Sn SLID has the potential of being a key...

BSAC Seminar: Micro and Nanoscale Acoustic Devices for Communication, Sensing, and Energy

February 16, 2011
Dr. Maryam Ziaei-Moayyed Advanced MEMS Department, Sandia National Laboratories BSAC MS 2005 February 16, 2011 | 02:00 to 03:00 | 400 Cory Hall, Hughes Room Host: Clark Nguyen

Continued scaling of micromechanical systems has enabled devices with improved performance and new functionalities that address needs in electronic, telecommunication, and medical industries. The presentation will focus on micro- and nano-scale Silicon Carbide (SiC) acoustic devices which are lithographically defined and fabricated using standard CMOS-...

BSAC Seminar: Energy Harvesting for Wireless Autonomous Sensor Systems

February 25, 2011
Dr. Ruud Vellers IMEC/Holst Centre, Micropower Group February 25, 2011 | 02:00 to 03:00 | 540 Cory Hall, DOP Center Conference Room Host: Liwei Lin

Batteries that power wireless autonomous transducer systems limit the possibilities of this emerging technology. The goal is to generate and store power at the microscale to improve autonomy and reduce size. Energy harvesters fabricated by microsystem technology can realize this goal. The choice of harvesting principle depends on the application and vibration, thermal, photovoltaic and radiofrequency power...

BSAC Seminar: How We Wanted to Revolutionize X-Ray Radiography and "Accidentally" Discovered Single-Photon Imaging

February 22, 2011
Prof. Peter Seitz CSEM/EPFL February 22, 2011 | 12:00 to 01:00 | 540 Cory Hall, DOP Center Conference Room Host: Kris Pister

Since the discovery of X-rays in 1895, radiography imagery has only been black-and-white. The reason for this can be found in any textbook on X-rays: the linear attenuation coefficient of a pure chemical element factorizes into a universal product of a power of the atomic number Z times a power of the X-ray photon energy E. Our careful analysis has shown that the simple textbook equation with constant exponents is incorrect, and...

BSAC Seminar: Surface Microfluidics: From Bio-Inspired Superhydrophobicity to Novel Fluidic Operations

March 29, 2011
Prof. Tingrui Pan Department of Biomedical Engineering, UC Davis March 29, 2011 | 12:00 to 01:00 | 540 Cory Hall, DOP Center Conference Room Host: David Horsley

Superhydrophobicity, also known as Lotus effect, has attracted numerous academic and industrial interests since its original discovery in the late 1980s. The remarkable water repellency and interfacial metastability on the natural superhydrophobic surfaces lead to discovery of intriguing physicochemical phenomena and principles at the micro-nanoscopic interface. For its further...

BSAC Seminar: Integrated On-Chip Inductors With Magnetic Material

March 15, 2011
Dr. Don Gardner Intel Corporation March 15, 2011 | 12:00 to 01:00 | 540 Cory Hall, DOP Center Conference Room Host: Liwei Lin

On-chip inductors with magnetic material are integrated into both advanced 130 and 90 nm CMOS processes. Increases in inductance of up to 30 times corresponding to an inductance density of up to 1,700 nH/mm2 were demonstrated, significantly greater than air-core and other on-chip inductors with magnetic material. With such improvements, the effects of eddy currents, skin effect, and proximity effect become clearly visible at...

BSAC Seminar: Flexible 4,096-Pixel Multi-Electrode Arrays of Electrodes, CMOS and Image Sensors: A Device for Interfacing Neural Circuitry and a Basis for Retinal Prosthesis

April 5, 2011
Prof. Long-Sheng Fan National Tsing Hua University/UC Berkeley April 5, 2011 | 12:00 to 01:00 | 540 Cory Hall, DOP Center Conference Room Host: John Huggins

To achieve localized retinal neural stimulation with high granularity over reasonable field of view within power constraints, we integrated a flexible 4,096-element retina chip 30 um in total thickness including passivation layers using a flexible 180nm CMOS Image Sensor (CIS) technology. The retina chip is 3x3 mm in size (including multiplexing electronics for pixel characterizations) with an...

BSAC Seminar: High-Q and Low-Impedance MEMS Resonators for Communication Applications

April 6, 2011
Li-Wen Hung Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, UC Berkeley BSAC Researcher, Disseration Presentation April 6, 2011 | 02:00 to 03:00 | 400 Cory Hall, Hughes Room Host: Clark Nguyen

With an increased need for regional and global roaming and continuous advances in wireless communication standards, future transceivers need to support multi-mode operation without increasing in cost, hardware complexity, and power consumption. Channel-selection filters offer a solution for more simplified and versatile transceivers....

BSAC Seminar: Ultra-High Density, Probe-Based Nonvolatile Memory Technology using Ferroelectric Recording Media: Issues and Solutions

April 12, 2011
Noureddine Tayebi Graduate Researcher, Stanford University/Intel April 12, 2011 | 12:00 to 01:00 | 540 Cory Hall, DOP Center Conference Room Host: John Huggins

Probe-based nonvolatile memory using ferroelectric media is an ideal candidate for future ultra-high density (> 1 Tbit/inch^2) memory devices. In such a device, an array of atomic force microscope (AFM) probes is used to write data by applying short electrical pulses to invert the polarization of local film volumes. However, no commercial product has reached the...