Facilities, Devices and Instruments

Text: Dr. Ulrich Beck, Photos: Sabine Radtke

Institute of Electronic Appliances and Circuits belogs to the Faculty for Electrical Engineering and Computer Science of the University of Rostock.
The thin film and interface team of the Institute GS is working at the University Campus in Warnemünde, Richard-Wagner-Str. 31. Main topics of this research team (Doz. Dr. Beck) are physical and electrochemical analysis of interfaces from biomaterials and bio-systems, creation (e.g. with PVD or micro arc or etching methods) and characterisation of coatings on implants and corrosion analysis.

Equipment

The Supra 25 FESEM (Zeiss, Oberkochen, Germany) is a low voltage microscope with currently highest resolution (1nm) of SEM’s in M-V. Main features of this device are: GEMINI optical column with thermal field Schottky-emitter (beam voltage from 100V to 30kV) Super resolution and image quality at low operating voltage (especially suitable for sensitive biological or semiconducting samples) without conductive coating of nonconducting samples High-effective and high-resolution in-lens SE1 detector Fast and liquid nitrogen free EDX system

Pictures produced with Supra 25 FESEM

The liquid nitrogen free EDX system X-Flash with Quantax (Bruker AXS, Berlin, Germany) with Peltier-cooler (cooling time < 30s) is a very fast and low-maintenance system with high resolution (< 133eV).

Pictures produced with EDX system X-Flash with Quantax

From microscopic pictures (stereo pairs) we can produce by use of MeX-software (Alicona, Graz, Austria) 3D-shapes of surfaces, high resolution surface profiles and compute a lot of parameters for describing surface shapes.   Pictures produced by use of MeX-software

Coatings, thin-films and multilayers can be produced by sputtering (LA320S, Ardenne, Dresden, Germany) or vapour dposition (B30, HV-Dresden, Germany) in clean room.
Thin layers of photo-resist for lithographic processes will be generated with spin-coater (Delta 10TT, Süss-MicroTec, Garching, Germany) also in clean room.
The versatile SEM S360 (Cambridge Instr./Leo, Cambridge, UK) with resolution of about 5nm is mainly used for student education and in combination with the Elphy-system (Raith, Dortmund, Germany) for electron beam lithography.	Lithography Pictures

The electrochemical computers IM6e (Zahner, Kronach, Germany) and Autolab (Eco-Chemie, Utrecht, Netherland) are used for characterisation of the interfaces between metallic biomaterials and electrolytic solutions or biosystems by DC- (Potentiometry, chronoamperometry, votammetry et al.) and AC-methods (EIS, Mott-Schottky et al.).

Pictures produced with electrochemical computers

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