Quests

Or, things we oughta be doing. Think of it as a tech tree but not in tree form yet, as that's difficult to maintain in a wiki.

Unless stated otherwise, these are topics that no-one is actively working on and that you can work on. Please consider picking some of these up!

Quests for those who like hunting for bargains on Ebay, Kleinanzeigen and industrial auction sites.

We need a roughing pump for our new-to-us SEM. As it will be backing a turbo, it needs to be a dry pump. This means we really have a choice between three technologies: scroll pumps, screw pumps and Roots pumps. The former is inadvisable, as scroll pumps have PTFE tips which wear out and are difficult to source replacements for. The tips wearing out also generate some dust. So we should go for a Roots pump.

Some recommendations: “Kashiyama NeoDry would 100% be my first choice, Ebara PDV/Osaka DSP/etc second”.

Ideally we would spend at most 500€ on this.

Deliverable: have said pump on site.

The plasma etcher came with a Leybold D16BCS rotary vane pump capable of being filled with chemically-resistant PFPE 'oils'. In case we find a good cheap refill of Fomblin we should get that. Otherwise any PFPE vacuum pump oil that can resist SF6 will do.

We are looking for a very good deal, the list price for 1L is in the high-hundreds-of-€ range.

Deliverable: have a bottle of said PFPE on site.

We need a fume hood, lab sink, and generally lab furniture (working surfaces, closets for chemicals, etc).

This is a very open ended topic and would be best driven by someone with experience in managing (or at least extensively using) such lab facilities in other organizations.

Quests for those who like to building out infrastructure on site. This means everything from coordinating with our landlords (if applicable) to buying the required materials and installing them on site.

It would be very nice to have 3-phase-power (eg. for the plasma etcher and its pump). There are likely sources of 3-phase power somewhere on our floor.

q3k can tell you more.

We should be able to bring in water from one of the utility rooms on our floor. We should bring that over to a lab sink in our rooms.

q3k and 0ff can tell you more.