Picture Gallery

Various pictures taken at FAFO :)

We used out Edwards AUTO 306 Coating System to thermally evaporate aluminum onto a 3D-printed PETG part. It doesn't stick well, but it was a fun exercise to see what happens when a 3D-print is placed into a vacuum chamber.

Lift-off process for coating an Among Us astronaut figure onto a wafer. Check the Fedi post for a bit more info.

We managed to acquire these very nice Edwards coating systems for sputtering, thermal evaporation, and e-beam coating.

Laser interferometer setup (Optics project) for measuring the displacement of the piezos on our Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM).

Laser diode in the back, the piezo under test is in the front, and a camera to the left to record the interference fringes.

Basic michelson interferometer set up using our 3d-printed optomechanical components. To the far left, the fringe pattern is projected onto a piece of paper.

See https://social.fa-fo.de/@fafo/115679126920409451 for context.

We managed to get our hands on some high-quality lab furniture. This is a work-in-progress picture of the (not yet functional) wet lab at FAFO.

Local interconnect layer of standard cell rows on one of our badly decapped samples.

Business end of our DIY Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM). You can see the tungsten wire tip barely above a shard of DVD that we were trying to image.

The strucures of the chip are in pretty bad shape from the sanding, but the marking and copyright year are clearly visible.

Photo was taken using our Zeiss DSM 962.

Fracture of a bare silicon die where the individual layers of the chip become visible.

Our second SEM, Zeiss DSM 962 (Kevin), right after arrival before we started putting it back together.

Our first big FAFO innovation: A gardena to KF 16 high vacuum adapter. Did you know gardena pulls down to 1e-6mbar of vacuum pressure?

The open source hardware (OSHW) logo photographed on a bare die using our JEOL JSM-T330A.

The valve block of our JEOL JSM-T330A (Kenji). What you're seeing:

• The PCB on the left is the vacuum control board, sporting a Z80 microcontroller. This board is mysteriously undocumented so we largely reverse-engineered it here:
  • Reverse Engineered Schematic (Sources)
• The left valve block right behind the PCB controls rough vacuum routing (vent, chamber, diffusion pump). It has 4 positions which are checked using the light barriers on top.
• The right valve block opens up the diffusion pump to the chamber once rough vacuum is reached.
  • For safety, there is a vacuum-driven clutch on this valve so it can only open when a rough vacuum is actually present.
• On the right, the back side of the sample chamber is visible.
• In front of the left valve block, two linear regulators are bolted to a metal plate. These provide the vacuum controller board with 24V and 5V DC power.

Our first SEM: JEOL JSM-T330A (Kenji)