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Facilities in Electrical Engineering
The Keck-Jones Microfabrication Facility for research in microelectronics, nanostructures, and optoelectronics is equipped for research in photolithography, diffusion, oxidation and annealing of semiconductors, vacuum evaporation of metals and insulators, reactive ion etching, and plasma enhanced deposition. It provides a class 10/100/1000 clean-room complex, occupying a 2700 sq. ft. contiguous area, for silicon and compound semiconductor processing. More.
The J. Robert Mann Laboratory for Instruction in Microelectronic Materials and Structures is a reduced version of the above facility and is used primarily for teaching and training. For more information, please contact Prof. Tso-Ping Ma.
The Semiconductor Characterization Laboratory has several probe stations connected to semiconductor parameter analyzers, impedance meters, oscilloscopes, curve tracers, lock-in amplifiers , and an assortment of other electronic instruments to allow measurements of I-V, C-V, G-V, DLTS, RTS, 1/f noise, and charge pumping characteristics over a wide range of frequencies and temperatures. It is equipped with a cluster of PC's which facilitate data acquisition and data analysis. For more information, please contact Prof. Tso-Ping Ma.
Scanning electron microscope and microlithography equipment are available in the Nanotechnology Laboratory. The Nanotechnology Laboratory has equipment for high resolution ebeam lithography, SEM characterization facilities, AFM and STM in both ambient and UHV environments, and an exceptionally wide range of device analysis capabilities. The laboratory specializes in the fabrication and investigation of nanostructured, quantum, and novel molecular scale devices. Characterization facilities include millikelvin dilution refrigerators and magnetic fields up to 12T, femto amp current resolution and SPAs. Variable temperature He-flow cryostats up to 300K complements this capability, as well as 77K direct probe capability. A 2-micron MFS adaptable HBT process (airbridge optional) with high frequency network analyzer characterization is available for device integration, high speed devices, or hybridization projects.
The laboratory is also equipped for research in MEMS, with ODE etching and thin film membrane expertise, and has full facilities of two cleanrooms for conventional MOS processes. We have facilities for chemical preparation (fume hoods, NMR, etc.) and extensive expertise in their characterization for research in molecular and biological systems, focusing on the integration with microelectronics. For more information, please contact Prof. Mark Reed.
The Optoelectronic Materials and Devices Laboratory has a state-of-the-art metal-organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) apparatus for the epitaxial growth of wide bandgap AlGaInN heterostructures and nanostructures. A new MOCVD reactor (Aixtron 200/4 HT) was installed in the summer of 2001 and became operational in spring of 2002. This system features a combined moisture-free glovebox and loadlock to ensure isolation between the epitaxial environment and the ambient. Special pancake-shape radio-frequency coil heating enables efficient coupling (temperature up to 1200C) and optical access to the reaction chamber. Numerous optical probes (reflectivity and pyrometry) are employed to provide in-situ and real-time feedback of growth process. This system is equipped with six metal-organic sources (expandable to ten) and three hydride sources (expandable to five), capable of supporting the growth of light emitting diodes, transistors, quantum wells, quantum dots, and nanowires. For more information, please contact Prof. Jung Han.
The Infrared Device Characterization Laboratory has a probe station for electrical characterization, a 1300 Celsius black body for calibrated optical measurements, a cryostat capable of reaching 10 degrees Kelvin, 670nm and 1.3um lasers, a spectrometer, and various function generators, oscilloscopes, lock-in amplifiers, high-speed transimpedance amplifiers, a Stanford Research spectrum analyzer, and a Hewlett Packard 4156B High Precision Semiconductor Parameter Analyzer capable of measuring femptoampere DC currents. The optical and electrical characterization of materials and devices (photoluminescence, electroluminescence, absorption, current-voltage measurements, detectivity, responsivity) can be carried out at operating temperatures between 10 Kelvin and room temperature. For more information, please contact Prof. Janet Pan.
The Embedded Networks and Applications Laboratory (ENALAB) has a testbed for the development and performance evaluation of wireless networks of small devices. This infrastructure consists of a three-dimensional fixture that holds a set of wireless sensor nodes. This enables researchers to instrument a diverse set of wireless sensing scenarios in a controlled setup and allows the validation of new communication protocols and algorithms. ENALAB is also equipped with the required hardware and software tools to develop and test application specific wireless sensor nodes using commercially available off-the-shelf components. Current projects include the development of protocols and algorithms for smart environments. The centerpiece of our work is the development of a wireless sensor network testbed consisting of smart, location-aware wireless sensor nodes developed at ENALAB. Through this testbed, our researchers are able to develop and validate new communication and algorithms that form the essential building blocks for a large variety of wireless sensing and ubiquitous computing applications. For more information, please contact Prof. Andreas Savvides.
The Materials Characterization Facility provides a micro-tensile testing facility capable of controlled loading of thin film and whisker samples from 0-30 g. Loading rates range from discrete 0.5 um steps to a continuous rate of 1mm/s with a maximum total displacement of 6.25 mm. The samples can be blanketed in inert gas during testing.
Also available are atomic force microscopes, scanning tunneling microscopes, and scanning electron microscopes for analyzing semiconductor surfaces; an energy and wavelength dispersive x-ray microprobe for chemical analysis; variable temperature photoluminescence and two-dimensional wafer mapping, photoluminescence excitation spectroscopes, equipment for reflectance/transmission measurements for optical measurements and for four-point probe resistivity measurements, and a computer controlled variable-temperature Hall measurement system for carrier concentration and mobility analysis. For more information, please contact Prof. Mark A. Reed.
The Laser Diagnostics and Optical Scattering Facilities include single mode and multimode Q-switched Nd:YAG lasers (with second-, third-, and fourth-harmonic outputs), mode-locked and Q-switched Nd:YAG lasers (with second- and third-harmonic outputs), high repetition rate GaAs pumped Q-switched Nd:YAG lasers, an excimer-pumped narrow band dye laser, TEA N2 and CO2 lasers, and computer-controlled large pixel CCD cameras, quantum limited CCD cameras, position-sensitive photomultipliers, intensified linear array photodiodes, framing cameras, and streak cameras. Every instrument is computer-controlled with full color graphic displays. For more information, please contact Prof. Richard K. Chang.
The Intelligent Sensors Laboratory contains signal processing and other instruments for acquisition and processing of information from acoustic, optical, and magnetic sensors. Research explores processes to extract information from sensor data. Acoustic, infrared, mechanical, magnetic, ultrasonic and vision sensors are positioned on robot arms and mobile robots. Biological sensing systems, which are often nonlinear and adaptive, are studied to develop novel strategies to complete a task. Sensor data analysis uses Gage high-speed analog-to-digital converters to acquire the data. Programs in Visual Basic, MatLab and C operate on Pentium computers to extract information, which is then used to control actuators. Current projects include an autonomous wheelchair that navigates around the campus, guided globally by GPS (Global Positioning System) and locally by sonar and laser sensors for collision avoidance and drop-off detection; electronic travel aids for the blind using binaural sonar for providing motion perception; and sensor systems producing action potentials that mimic biological sensing and perception.
Current and recent projects include: RoDolph (RObot DOLPHin), a sonar system that differentiates the head from tail side of a coin directly from the echoes; a mobile robot arm equipped with sonar and infrared sensors that learns about its environment while foraging for food and developing a map of the charted region; a multi-range infrared proximity sensor system controlled by stamp computers for implementing wall following and obstacle avoidance for a robot vacuum cleaner; fusing sonar sensing with camera vision to develop a sonar-guided camera system that reduces the complexity of object recognition; implementing a small autonomous underwater vehicle that employs sonar for sensing, registration, communication and power transfer. For more information, please contact Prof. Roman Kuc.
The Medical Image Analysis Laboratories contain research facilities for developing algorithms for processing and analyzing medical image data that is acquired from a variety of modalities, such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Nuclear Medicine, ultrasound, and x-ray Computed Tomographic imagers, all accessible via a network. The Laboratories have about 20 Unix and Windows NT workstations, including 5 state-of-the-art machines from Silicon Graphics which are used for visualization of 3D and 4D medical image-derived information. This information is used in applications ranging from recovering the deformation properties of the left ventricle of the heart to developing strategies for image-guided neurosurgery and searching and sorting medical image databases indexed by pictorial content. For more information, please contact Prof. James S Duncan.
The Carl A. Morse Teaching Center supports the laboratory portion of the core courses in Electrical Engineering and wide-ranging Senior and other student projects involving electronics (for Yale's solar car in SunRayce '97, '98, '99), robotic sensors, hi-fi equipment, sports training apparatus, implementations of neural networks, a 3-D laser projection system (one of the winners in the 1996 B.F. Goodrich Inventor's Contest), infra-red modem links, etc. Also available are machine shop fabrication resources, often critical to such projects. In 1996, a major grant by Hewlett-Packard equipped the lab with bench stations, each with instrumentation interfaced to desk-top Pentium PCs networked to local shared resources (workgroup servers, printers, plotters) and to the full resources of Yale and the Internet. This "open" information and work bench environment provides measurement and control (via LabVIEW), simulation (via PSpice and Electronic Workbench), and catalogs, also course files on the Web and work files shared via the server. For more information, please contact Prof. Peter Kindlmann.
The J. Robert Mann Laboratory for System Design and Simulation, part of the Morse Center, extends the hardware and software tools toward larger simulation needed for VLSI design and testing. For more information, please contact Prof. Peter Kindlmann.
Electrical Engineering also maintains VLSI CAD tools that include Cadence EDA and Synopsis EDA. Students can use CAD tools to design analog and digital VLSI integrated circuits and to simulate designs on schematic and extracted views from the layout. CAD tools also provide layout capabilities and cross-check layout versus schematic for most modern fabrication processes. The Synopsis tools allow to implement place-and-route capabilities as well and floor planning for advanced design. Circuit board design tools are also part of Cadence. More information.
Faculty and students have access to networks of Hewlett Packard workstations, Windows NT PC's, and numerous Linux and Intel/Windows NT workstations and servers.
e-Lab (ELab) is a VLSI mixed-signal design laboratory specialized in the development of advanced circuits.
e-Lab research interests focus on circuits for sensing, conditioning and processing while mapping topologies and available technologies to the physical level of the source of information. e-lab uses modern fabrication technologies, as 3D CMOS integration, Silicon-on-Sapphire and Silicon-on Insulator, asynchronous design, for the innovative design of circuits and systems.
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