Picture of the Month – Winners 2017

Back to the current year Winners

2017, December

MoS2 in Christmas mood
Martina Lihter, LBEN

MoS2 growth was assisted by stencil mask made in CMi cleanroom. However, I find it extremely beautiful as a Christmas card, so I will use this opportunity to wish you all Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!


2017, November

Micro-golf in the CMi
Hendrik Schutz, LPQM

It is no surprise this truly presidential sport has now conquered the micro scale. When the CMi staff is gone, the PhD students take out their micro golf clubs and hit the green (well, mostly grey). Admittedly though, this attempt did not make it that far off the tee. Sad! Shown in the picture is an SiO2 microsphere that has fallen off its silicon needle pillar after a too long XeF2 undercut. To fabricate the spheres, micro-disks are reflowed by exposing them to focused high power light at 10um wavelength from a CO2 laser.


2017, October

Cantilever Rodeo
Kaitlin Howell, Andrea Lozzi, NEMS

Welcome to the beam rodeo! These wily beams have escaped across the river to avoid being lassoed. They have escaped for now but not for long! Cantilevers comprised of Mo and HfO2 have been released by HF vapor (uETCH) but collapsed due to stiction. Green areas are Al pads on contact electrodes. The lasso is a collection of fences left over from plasma etching of the beams during their definition. The fences themselves deattached and curled on themselves. Image taken in Zeiss LEO 1550.


2017, September

Nano-tornado
Clementine Lipp, EP-DD-DT/CERN

XeF2 gas phase etches large silicon areas with features in the shape of spirals, resulting in a very specific microclimate.


2017, August

Haricots gris
Wonjong Kim, LMSC

Here is the SEM image of Haricots gris. It is cultivated in CMi and with Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE) system. Random impurity was attractive enough for two gallium droplets to sit on it.


2017, July

HSQuid
Stefano Varricchio, LMIS4

Marine nano-Life was created by transferring HSQ rings made with e-beam lithography in bulk silicon. The slight under-etch and the high stability of the circular HSQ mask prevents the 20nm-wide HSQ ring from collapsing and leaves it suspended on a web-like structure.


2017, June

Edelweiss and its pollen
Anastasiia Glushkova, LPMC

Instead of growing inside a submicron-wide SiO2 channel on Si substrate this perovskite nanowire prefers to become a flower 🙂


2017, May

Emmental CMi AOP
Michael Graf, LBEN

This special Emmental deserves its AOP (appelation d’origine protégée) label. It has been made 100% in CMi with high-quality Swiss ingredients. Delamination of chromium, platinum and silicon dioxide layers in combination with a few impurities lead to these nice slices of Emmental CMi AOP.


2017, April

Makeup palette
Elmira Shahrabi, LSM

These “cosmetics makeup” panels are made of tungsten vias placed in an oxide (SiO2) box. The plate is basically a part of the CMOS 180 nm chip which was post processed in CMi in order to co-integrate Resistive Random Access Memory (ReRAM) within CMOS chips. The idea is to benefit from embedded tungsten vias inside the CMOS chips to make ReRAM structure, where via acts as a bottom electrode, hafnium oxide as a switching layer and platinum as a top electrode.


2017, March

G[r]aAs[s] Farming
Martin Friedl, LMSC

The arrival of spring has finally enabled us to achieved the impossible: on-wafer grass growth! The secret is giving your wafers unconditional love and avoiding the O2 plasma… Just kidding it’s GaAs (as usual).


2017, February

Micro-lego-brick
Kevin Keim, CLSE

These 3D electrodes were fabricated by covering SU-8 micro-pillars via metal sputtering. The metal on top and on the substrate was subsequently removed by ion beam etching. The irregular structure of the SU-8 below the metal breaks the symmetry of this artistic SEM micrograph. By increasing the contrast and observing under an angle of 70deg to the surface, the electrodes seem to appear out of nothing. This structure assembles a 100 times miniaturized lego-brick, fabricated and observed in EPFL CMi facilities.


2017, January

Sushi boat
Stefano Varricchio, LMIS4

Nanostructured silicon of different densities embedded in amorphous carbon and silicon dioxide surface after planarization. Not edible!