This is a past event.

Materials Science and Engineering Seminar

Nupur Bihari, PhD Student
Department of Materials Science and Engineering
Michigan Technological University

Abstract: Polymer-based 3-D printing has radically reduced costs for scientific equipment. Despite the ubiquity in research applications, polymers have remained conspicuously absent from semiconductor research, primarily due to their apparent incompatibility with vacuum equipment and processing. However, if polymers are coated with a conformal, crystalline inorganic film with atomic layer deposition (ALD), then outgassing can be reduced significantly, potentially opening up vacuum processing to polymer tooling. This research project aims to utilize the conditions present in a vacuum chamber outfitted with a residual gas analyzer (RGA) to rapidly test the viability of ALD-coated 3-D printed polymers to exposure to ultrahigh vacuum. In addition to understanding the outgassing characteristics of 3-D printed polymers with ALD coatings, this study will investigate the possibility of using 3-D printed polymer materials to construct an ALD system.

Bio: Ms. Nupur Bihari received her MS in Electrical Engineering from Michigan Technological University in 2015. She is currently a doctoral student in Materials Science and Engineering, Michigan Technological University. Her research interests include design and fabrication of nano and microscale level devices and optoelectronic phenomena. She is currently developing a low-cost open source atomic layer deposition system for conformal coating of hafnium oxide thin films on polymer and semiconductor substrates and is interested in mechanical and electrical behavior of materials in vacuum and plasma environments. In the near future, she wishes to explore the possibility of manufacturing low-cost, open-source and accessible polymer-based high vacuum chambers capable of plasma, deposition and etch conditions.