Tag: Newsletter

Like little colorful jewels, these microscopic spots of color are probably the remnants of a thin coating that once covered this sample. The spots get their color not from the usual pigments or dyes that color things like flower petals and paint, but from another phenomenon, called structural color, which

There aren’t any dyes or pigments in this photo - all this color is due to the wave nature of light. Thin transparent films produce rainbows, when light waves bouncing off the top and the bottom of the film interfere with each other on the way back. It’s

Coastline of the land of monuments… tiny monuments. Each of them would fit easily inside a single human cell. They’re formed out of semiconductor, and are the result of what we call micromasking: tiny bits of debris landed on the semiconductor before the etching step, and protected the semiconductor

Thin transparent films produce rainbows - an effect due to the wave nature of light (the same effect that gives soap bubbles their rainbow colors). Here, the thin film might be photoresist or dried residue from some sort of solvent, like acetone. I’ll probably never know, since this wasn’

This one looked to me like a line of people, standing at attention. It’s actually an edge-on view of a comb-like grating structure, seen here as it passes between two rectangular alignment markers. The people-like shape is due to the weird way the plasma etcher ate away the semiconductor,

Frostlike patterns emerge when acetone partially dissolves a plasticy layer of old photoresist. This is the same sample as in my previous post [http://tmblr.co/ZP7VLs_nDmsM], which used to be covered in jagged black mountains made of plasma-damaged photoresist. Now the mountains are mostly dissolved away, except for

This image is from a test of our plasma etcher, and shows a white plain of semiconductor laser material etched partially away by plasma. In the background is the black remains of photoresist that was protecting other areas of semiconductor from being etched - it did the job, but took

A strange miniature landscape, none of which is supposed to be there. It’s quite small indeed - the pinnacles are each less than 1 micrometer tall, which means you’d need to stack a thousand of them on top of each other to equal one millimeter. This landscape is

Standing at the edge of the world. At microscopic scales, even a clean break isn’t very clean - this electron microscope picture is of the edge of a piece of glass, on which I had fabricated a long wall of semiconductor (the long columned wall you see at the

There are no dyes or pigments in this microscope image - it’s a thin clear film on a blank mirrorlike surface, and all the colors come from the interference of light waves. It’s the same effect that produces the rainbow colors in thin soap bubbles, or on a