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High Speed Data Acquisition in Nanoscale Imaging

Nanotechnology has taken engineering to new scales, but how has time resolution changed with these scales? Testing in nanoscale has recently become much more time resolvable through the use of high-speed high-resolution data acquisition systems. Our project uses the National Instruments PX1e-1071 data acquisition system to significantly speed up measurements taken with a scanning probe microscope. To start, a scanning probe microscope moves a probe across the surface of a test chip to map its topological or electrical characteristics. These microscopes take readings in the dozens of kilohertz and average thousands of measurements to achieve useful resolutions. Rather than the existing system running at tens of hertz, our system can sample at megahertz. This speed will allow researchers to identify device behavior happening at those speeds as well.

Team Members: 

Katherine Anderson

Vic Frederick

Cassandra Huff

Clara Johnson

Ran Trakhtengerts

Jerry Yang

Semester