Tufts Micro/Nano Fab

— PhD students Minchul Shin and Zhengxin Zhao working in the Tufts Micro/Nano Fab c. 2011.

This is a Class 1000 cleanroom and Core Facility for the University started by our group and run as a user facility with help from Dr. Jim Vlahakis and the School of Engineering. The lab has thin film deposition, photolithography, etching, packaging and metrology for MEMS and NEMS. See the TMNF website for more details.

Vibrations and Acoustics Lab / Sensors and Systems Lab

— Undergraduate Freidlay Steve looking through a microscope at a silicon device wafer in the sensors and systems lab, 2021.

The lab is a mechanical/electrical prototyping facility and test lab.

On the fabrication side we have good ability to do printed circuit board assembly and rework, including hot air SMT rework, solder reflow, and soldering, as well as mechanical prototyping and assembly. We have a few benchtop 3D printers, a medium sized manual milling machine, bandsaw/drill press, and mechanical assembly areas.

On the testing side, we have a wide selection of sensing systems for sound and vibration including accelerometers and microphones, electrodynamic shakers, impact hammers, speakers, and data acquisition abilities. This includes multiple light microscopes and probestations for electrical and geometric measurements at the microscale.

We also have a nice microscale Laser Doppler Velocimetry system (LDV) for vibration measurements with sub-angstrom resolution at frequencies from 10 Hz-20 MHz and spot size of less than 20 microns. The system is capable of single point transient scans, two dimensional spatially distributed steady state vibration scans, and two dimensional spatially distributed transient scans.

We have various custom setups including a large temperature controlled vacuum chamber for acoustic measurements in low pressure air and carbon dioxide, a turbulent flow duct and laminar flow cells for shear sensor and aeroacoustic calibration, and are working on a recirculating wind tunnel setup for measurements at flow speeds up to Mach 0.5.