Cells spreading on Micro-fabricated Silica Thin film Coatings

Thin-film silica sol-gel coatings for neural microelectrodes.

The reactive tissue response of the brain to chronically implanted materials remains a formidable obstacle to stable recording from implanted microelectrodes. One approach to mitigate this response is to apply a bioactive coating in the form of an ultra-porous silica sol-gel, which can be engineered to improve biocompatibility and to enable local drug delivery. The first step in establishing th...

Barrier coatings for thin film solar cells: Final subcontract report

Microscopic model for thin film spreading.

A microscopic, driven lattice gas model is proposed for the dynamics and spatiotemporal fluctuations of the precursor film observed in spreading experiments. Matter is transported both by holes and particles, and the distribution of each can be described by driven diffusion with a moving boundary. This picture leads to a stochastic partial differential equation for the shape of the boundary. Ex...

A Micro-Fabricated Force Sensor Using an All Thin Film Piezoelectric Active Sensor

The ability to measure pressure and force is essential in biomedical applications such as minimally invasive surgery (MIS) and palpation for detecting cancer cysts. Here, we report a force sensor for measuring a shear and normal force by combining an arrayed piezoelectric sensors layer with a precut glass top plate connected by four stress concentrating legs. We designed and fabricated a thin f...

Spreading of thin-film metal patterns deposited on nonplanar surfaces

The application of a three dimensional, self-aligning shadow mask in 110 -oriented silicon for thin-film metal deposition is discussed. This shadow mask is used for the deposition of metal tracks on the bottom of structures with vertical sidewalls, i.e., the patterning of metal catalytic patches underneath the membrane that covers the deep flow channel of a high-temperature gas microreactor. Th...