MEMS Center in Wireless Integrated Microsystems  A multi-university National Engineering Research Center in Wireless Integrated Microsystems funded by the National Science Foundation gives MTU a strong base for microtechnology research. Among its first projects, the center will design a next generation cochlear implant for which MTU will design and build a |
Applied Chemical and Morphological Analysis Laboratory The Applied Chemical and Morphological Analyses Laboratory (ACMAL) is a university facility that houses an extensive array of electron microanalytical and x-ray instruments. Electron beam instrumentation includes two scanning electron microscopes (SEM), a high-resolution transmission electron microscope (TEM) and a focused ion beam milling system (FIB). X-ray equipment includes a sequential x-ray fluorescence spectrometer and five x-ray diffractometers. |
Integrated Photonics and Materials Integration Laboratory The equipment in the laboratory serves the fabrication, testing and analysis of photonic and piezoelectric structures, materials and film-based devices. Research in integrated photonics centers on the use of magneto-optic and electro-optic materials. Recent work has centered on the development and fabrication of magnetic photonic crystals. A second thrust involves the development and fabrication of optical and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) based on novel highly efficient piezoelectric films.
Tools consist of an rf magnetron sputtering system for the fabrication of magneto-optic films; an electron-beam writing system housed in a JEOL 6400 SEM and a Hitachi Focused Ion Beam (FIB) System for nano-patterning of photonic structures, both housed in the Applied Chemical and Morphological Analysis Laboratory; a metal evaporator for the deposition of electrodes; a micro-manipulator; a prism-coupler for the study of refractive indices and film thickness; an optical testing laboratory for the analysis of waveguide devices that includes HP and Ando infrared tunable laser sources. |
Multi-Scale Technologies Institute (MuSTI) Multi-scale technologies are those that bring together functional elements to form systems where the relative size of components within the system spans from the nano through the micro and into the macro domain. The systems-focus of MuSTI emphasizes the challenges associated with integrating technologies that have relative feature sizes orders of magnitude apart and operating characteristics that are size dependent. This presents many problems that must be addressed by interdisciplinary teams of researchers using specialized equipment. Research focuses on engineered systems and components such as nanoelectronics, nanosensors and systems, and associated materials. |
Center for Nanomaterials Research The Center for Nanomaterials Research is an interim center at Michigan Tech leading to a more comprehensive center focusing on the science and applications of technologies across many orders of dimensional magnitude and integrating nanotechnologies with microtechnologies and conventional systems. The interdisciplinary research can be summarized in three areas. The first is the modeling and development of room-temperature single electron transistors coupled with proteins to form nanosensors and electronics for sensing applications. These components are based on quantum effects that dominate at component sizes of approximately 10 nanometers or less. Biological proteins offer many sensing advantages including narrowly defined sensitivity, no power consumption, and self-assembly. The second area is the modeling and development of magnetic nanophotonic devices for optical communications and navigation systems. These devices literally grow and shrink under the influence of a magnetic field changing the transmission properties of light. These are efficient filters and modulators that can operate over a wide spectrum in a single device. The third area is the physical and functional integration of these devices with microscale and conventional systems through interconnection technologies. The electrical and mechanical behavior of connections that operate at both the nanoscale and microscale will be systematically evaluated. Component feature sizes may be as small as several nanometers in devices with dimensions of micrometers driving a system with dimensions of millimeters. The thrust of the center is to develop technologies that exploit the advantages of small size and low power of nanoscale components and yet retain the functionality of conventional-sized systems. |
Ultra High Density Electronic Components Molecular Electronics (Moletronics) has opened up a new frontier aiming at ultimate miniaturization of electronic circuits with ultra high density electronic components. This research program is primarily focused on addressing the fundamental challenges in molecular electronics by understanding the complex phenomena like "controlled electron transport" in molecular wires, which forms the basis of molecular electronics. One recent outcome was the finding of a "conformational molecular switch"--a molecular wire exhibiting current switching between the planar and perpendicular orientations of the two pi-electron moieties with planar configuration (ON state) giving significantly higher current than the perpendicular conformation (OFF state). |
Exact Diagonalization Methods for Understanding Nanostructures, Spin Chains, High-Tc Cuprates, Ladders and Frustrated Spin Systems  This research program, oriented toward understanding strongly correlated condensed matter, involves apply numerical techniques to probe and understand the properties of strongly correlated electronic systems. The research is focused on Exact Diagonalization methods as a tool for understanding nano structures, High-Tc cuprates, ladders, spin chains and frustrated spin systems. |
Ionic Liquid Chemical Sensing Devices This technology emerged from a long-term effort devoted to developing piezobiosensors and electrochemical sensors for detection in complex environments. The technology is designed to detect chemicals using novel ionic liquid technology. Critical features of the technology include: (1) methods to immobilize ionic liquids on solid supports, (2) capabilities for characterizing and elucidating the physicochemical properties of immobilized ionic liquids, (3) new ionic liquids incorporating functional groups capable of acting as anchors or tags for surface immobilization, and (4) ionic liquid thin films for array-based gas sensing and high-temperature gas sensing. |
Contact Angles on Materials with Heterogeneous Surfaces This research program is an exploration of the interaction of fluids with heterogeneous solid surfaces are particularly important in material surface-based industrial processes such as printing, patterning, fabrication of MEMS devices, separation of plastics, de-inking flotation, and others. Because these interactions depend on the nature of the heterogeneity, its size, morphology, and distribution, a comprehensive study of the interaction between fluids and heterogeneous surfaces is an important advance. The results are being used to test available theories of wetting phenomena; experiments involve real-world heterogeneous materials and “well defined” heterogeneous surfaces composed of adsorbed and self-assembled organic layers of varying functionality, structure, and density. Both atomic force microscopy and contact angle measurement technique are used in examination of interactions of fluids of varying polarity with heterogeneous surfaces. |
Using Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) to Analyze Surface Energy of Pull-off (Adhesion) Forces Atomic force microscopy (AFM) is capable of characterizing solid surfaces at the microscopic and sub-microscopic scales. As demonstrated in several laboratories in recent years, it can also be used to determine the surface tension of solids based on adhesion (pull-off) force measurements. Before AFM force measurements can become an accepted technique for particle-substrate adhesion characterization, individual problems causing irreproducibility of the measurement must be resolved. This is particularly important in the measurement of pull-off forces in very complex geometry systems that are of importance to the industry. For example, this research program has resulted in measures of the adhesion forces between pharmaceutical particles with irregular geometry and polymeric surfaces of varying roughness in a gas of controlled humidity level. |
Heteroepitaxial growth on compliant substrates This program of research is focused on the fabrication, characterization, and properties of nanoscale layered structures. Additional concentrations include the integration of dissimilar materials through wafer bonding and the relationship between structural, optical and electronic properties of heterostructures. |
Numerical Speedup Using Flowpaths Applications for computer simulations include many research areas such as weather prediction, tracking the location and concentrations of contaminants in groundwater, oil recovery, studying disease processes, designing experiments, and developing medications. In these and several other applications, it is desirable to achieve speedup of numerical code. Current work in speeding up numerical simulations has several disadvantages. Considering the various disadvantages of each method, project will develop methods that increases the speed and (1) does not require rewriting an existing algorithm, although could be improved even further by making minor coding modification, (2) does not require algorithms written in traditional languages to be rewritten in other language, (3) executes portions of the code in parallel but does not suffer from the overhead of either a single microprocessor or multi-processor architecture, and (4)does not require time and effort to engineer and implement a special circuit for different types of numerical algorithms. This work proposes to develop such a technology using flowpaths where, starting with a C (or potentially FORTRAN) description of a numerical algorithm, a compiler will generate an executable that can be downloaded and will run on the Power PC embedded in an FPGA with parallel flowpaths to speedup the bottleneck loops in the numerical algorithm automatically.
With such a speed-up, some simulations that require real-time execution that can not currently be achieved by a PC will be able to run at a higher speed and achieve a real-time pace. The success of this research will result in future investigation including deriving optimizations for the compiler and resulting circuits, improving numerical schemes for optimal implementation in hardware and enhancing the compiler to support other popular languages.
The intellectual merit of this research project from a scientific computational standpoint lies in the discovery of new coding techniques that make optimal use of flowpaths in order to achieve higher simulation speeds. The intellectual merit in hardware design for speedup lies in the unique use of flowpaths for creating special-purpose processors for new and existing numerical code, automatically. This project serves as a novel interdisciplinary approach, combining expertise in scientific computation of numerical algorithms and high-speed embedded systems for significantly increasing the performance of numerical code, with impact both in software as well as in hardware technologies. |
Ultra-Broadband Optical Wireless Communication Networks This collaborative research project undertakes a multidisciplinary approach to optical wireless communications (OWC) networks and focuses on the first/last mile between the existing fiber-optic backbone and many homes and small of-fice buildings. The project aims at developing novel OWC networking and communications theory and techniques including those at the physical layer that overcome the scintillation (variation in light intensity) caused by the at-mospheric turbulence in OWC networks through sub-carrier modulation and coding, and those at the link and network layers that take into consideration the unique capabilities and constraints of OWC when designing optimal topol-ogy, survivable routing, and innovative dynamic reconfiguration algorithms to mitigate the negative effects of heavy or dense fog, as well as reduce the per link cost. As a result of the project effort, an OWC ring network will be built, running multimedia applications. The success of the project is expected to pro-vide an affordable ultra-broadband first/last mile access, enable new multime-dia applications to be delivered to residential homes and small office buildings, and serve as a stepping stone to the integration of heterogeneous technologies based on radio frequency (e.g., Wireless Local Area Networks, WLAN, and cellu-lar networks) and fibers. |
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