By Gail Purvis, Small Times guest contributor
 University of Cambridge professor Sir Alec Broers officiated the opening of Glasgow University’s JWNC. (Photo: Gail Purvis) |
Mar. 28, 2007 — The new James Watt Nanofabrication Centre (JWNC) at Glasgow University, Scotland, nestled over and into one of Lord Kelvin’s original laboratories, boasts an impressive array of equipment and capabilities: large area, high resolution, immensely versatile e-beam Vistec VB6, metal and dielectric sputtering using RF and DC magnetrons; mask aligning (with double sided capability); flip-chip bonding; nano-scale embossing; high resolution SEM and ATM; atomic force microscopy; surface profilometry; plasma deposition; and reactive ion etching. Metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistor technology is an important area of expertise.
This month, coinciding with the facility’s official opening by Lord Broers, the Ultrafast Systems Group was awarded £4m research funding for three years from the UK’s Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council for a project shared between the Departments of Electronics, Electrical Engineering, Physics and Astronomy and led by Professor Ian Thayne.
Speaking on behalf of his 20-person research team and describing recent work with Freescale Semiconductor Inc., Thayne said, “We have convinced ourselves of the feasibility and viability of producing device quality III-V oxides, and jointly developed the necessary process modules to combine these high quality oxides with high mobility III-V channel materials.”
“With the new funding we are now looking to exploit this potential, realizing sub-20nm critical dimension transistor geometries,” he added. Thayne notes that by aggressively targeting scaled III-V MOSFETs for advanced digital applications, the group will be well positioned to also realize devices for mixed signal and RF use.
In the optoelectronic field Professor Catrina Bryce is leading eight investigators in work on semiconductor mode-lock pulsing lasers as compact, low-cost sources of short pulses with higher output power. “For optical communications applications these lasers need to be developed and we need to look at 40Ghz and 160Ghz,” she said, adding, “A further use for mode-lock lasers is in the generation of terahertz radiation.”
In biosensors and micro fluidics JWNC work is in the field of Lab-in-a-pill and aims to develop new miniaturized analytic techniques for biology and chemistry and the Centre is in collaboration on proteomic technology, with Edinburgh and Dundee Universities and in bio-nanotechnology with Oxford University and the National Institute for Medical Research.
Other work underway is on molecular interconnect through molecular self-assembly under Professor David Cumming; molecular architectures in Professor Lee Cronin’s team and nano-biomimetics for bone tissue engineering, where Dr Matt Dalby is in collaboration with the University of Southampton and notes that research is at a stage where commercial developments are looking “realistic.”