NanoBits Exchangeable and Customizable Scanning Probe Tips

Goal

The atomic force microscope (AFM) has become a standard and wide spread instrument for characterizing nanoscale devices and can be found in most of today's research and development areas. The NanoBits project provides exchangeable and customizable scanning probe tips that can be attached to standard AFM cantilevers offering an unprecedented freedom in adapting the shape and size of the tips to the surface topology of the specific application. NanoBits themselves are 2-4 μm long and 120-150 nm thin flakes of heterogeneous materials fabricated in different approaches. These novel tips will allow for characterizing three dimensional high-aspect ratio and sidewall structures of critical dimensions such as nanooptical photonic components and semiconductor architectures which is a bottle-neck in reaching more efficient manufacturing techniques. It is thus an enabling approach for almost all future nanoscale applications.

The following SEM images illustrate the microgripper-based assembly of prototypic NanoBit AFM probes.

Persons
Publications
Automatisierte Handhabung und Montage von anpassbaren AFM-Messspitzen

Bartenwerfer, M. and Eichhorn, V. and Jasper, D. and Fatikow, S.; Proceedings of the 3rd GMM Workshop on Micro-Nano-Integration; 001 / 2011

Automated Handling and Assembly of Customizable AFM-Tips

Bartenwerfer, M. and Eichhorn, V. and Jasper, D. and Fatikow, S. and Savenko, A. and Petersen, D.~H. and Malm, B. and Bøggild, P.; Proccedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Assembly and Manufacturing (ISAM'11); 001 / 2011

A Rapid Automation Framework for Applications on the Micro- and Nanoscale

Diederichs, Claas and Bartenwerfer, Malte and Mikczinski, Manuel and Zimmermann, Sören and Tiemerding, Tobias and Geldmann, Christian and Nguyen, Ha and Dahmen, Christian and Fatikow, Sergej; Proceedings of Australasian Conference on Robotics and Automation; 12 / 2013

Closing the Loop: High-Speed Visual Servoing and Control of a commercial Nanostage inside the SEM

Tiemerding, Tobias and Diederichs, Claas and Zimmermann, Sören and Fatikow, Sergej; Proceedings of the 3rd 3M-NANO Conference; 08 / 2013

Automated mechanical characterization of 2D materials using SEM based visual servoing

Zimmermann, Sören and Tiemerding, Tobias and Fatikow, Sergej and Wang, W. and Li, T. and Wang, Y.; Proceedings of the 3M-NANO Conference; 08 / 2013

Partners
EMPA - Swiss Federal Laboratories for Material Testing and Research
www.empa.ch
DTU Mikroelektronic Centret (Dänemark)
www.nanotech.dtu.dk
Fraunhofer-Institut für angewandet Optik und Feinmechanik IOF
www.iof.fraunhofer.de
NanoWorld AG
www.nanoworld.com
JPK Instruments AG
www.jkp.com

Duration

Start: 31.08.2010
End: 30.08.2013

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