What is it?
The Nanolab is NTNU’s state-of-the-art cleanroom, and also my main laboratory during my thesis project. My project is multi-diciplinary, so I spend time in different labs for each part of the work. At the Nanolab, I fabricate the devices I’m using to perform electrical characterization of single nanowires.

Below, I’ve tried to show you a bit of the Nanolab and explain what you see. Enlarge images by clicking them.

More text below the picture.

When entering the Nanolab, one start in the end of the corridor and work your way towards where this picture is taken.

Ready for action in the ISO5&6 areas (click to enlarge)

The procedure for getting dressed starts even before the dressing corridor. First, you must put on a hairnet and some dark flip-flops. Then, starting in the corridor, you switch to another pair of flip-flops – these are white.

Then you take on the hood, the body suit and then you put on the “booties” outside the white flipflops. Almost done, all that remains is your mouth cover and your gloves.

It’s time to enter the lab.
The Nanolab consists of an area for chemical methods and a cleanroom for physical methods (which this sneek-peek is about).

The physical lab is made out of a main corridor (seen in below image) and five arms containing different equipment. The first two arms are of clean room level ISO7, while the three inner arms are of the cleaner ISO 5 and ISO6 (about cleanroom classifications).

Main corridor of the physical methods area

The aim of my thesis project is to characterize semiconductor nanowires. To do this I need to make metal contacts onto the nanowires. A nanowire is typically 2-4 micrometre and 50-100 nanometre in diameter. Making such contacts is done using two machines:

• Electron Beam Lithography
• Electron beam evaporation

I might explain the manchines in a later postm later, but lots of time is spent next to these two machines. Additionally, we use photolithography machine, resist spinners and of course the work benches. The machines can be seen  below.

Light is yellow’ish because of the light sensitive chemicals used in this cleanroom area.

I will try to explain my thesis project in more detail in a later post. Happy easter to you all!

The fourth arm in the physical methods area. This is where I spend my time in the Nanolab. The light is yellow because of the photolithography machine where we use material that are light sensitive.

A photomontage of some chemicals, resist spinners and the border between two very clean environments

I’m tired. Dead tired. But quite happy, considering! It’s been a hard week, lots and lots of work, workout, school and other activities.

Right now I’m trying to determine the growth density of doped nanowires and it’s quite boring. It’s aproximately like counting sheep, they’re just smaller and luckily they don’t jump around. One sample to go …

I’m looking forward to a weekend; it’s packed, but the pace of everything slows down slightly.

I’m specially looking forward to Møbelringen Cup Sunday with Christina, Andreas and Ellen. The Norwegian handball ladies will play Russia (and win). It will be epic!

Options and their probability

I have a lot of question going on in my mind these days. I don’t think about them all the time, but they’re there. I’m in my final year of my Masters degree in Electronics – uncertainty is getting closer.

I don’t know what I will do or where I will be after June 2010. And that’s a scary thought.

I have three possible and probable options

• Find a job
• Apply for a PhD position at NTNU
• Stay a student and take classes I like

To find a job is the “normal” thing to do, and what I consider it to be the most probable.  The more I’ve been working on my project this fall, the more I find it intriguing to apply for a PhD position here at NTNU, I like what I do for my project. But do I like it enough to continue for 3-4 more years? Again an unanswered question.

The last thing on my list is to spend a 6th year in Trondheim as a student.  I’ve been thinking of taking classes I haven’t been able to take during my time here. I’d like to learn more languages and to get more formal knowledge of computer science.

This post is a bit hard to wrap up, many thoughts and questions have popped into my mind as I’ve been writing.

I will have to figure it out. I will.

Finally, today FX and I got a short talk with our tutor concerning our project. We’ve had difficulties with programming a least squares fitting algorithm in C and needed some help (I know there are libraries that implements this functionality already, but we’re not allowed to use them).

Basically we didn’t get too much out of our tutor, but we’re seeing him on Wednesday and he gave us a few hints about how to start coding.

We’re running a bit late as the report on this project has to be delivered on Friday this week. Luckily, most of the report is done (everything we’ve done throughout the year so far), so it’s only the last part that is missing from the report itself.

Tomorrow, there are two presentations to be made, one is QSE (Qualité, Sécurité et Environnement) (Similar to “Eksperter i Team” at NTNU) and the other is Conduit de projet (“Project execution”). I think we’ll do ok on both of them, we’re quite well prepared.