High aspect ratio (HAR) microstructures are widely used in fields of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and three-dimensional integrated circuits (3D-IC). Depth of HAR structures, as one of the key functional features, largely determines both the performance of micro and nanostructured sensors and the process difficulty. In particular, the process trend of HAR exacerbates the scale effect and triggers defects such as filled voids and defects, resulting in poor depth uniformity, which greatly affects the actual performance of the device. Therefore, it is essential to develop a reliable method for accurately inspecting the depth of HAR microstructure, especially in-line inspection. However, traditional reflection spectroscopy measurements face a significant challenge due to the sharp attenuation of the optical signal returned from the bottom of the structures. In this study, we propose an optical measurement method that utilizes reflection spectroscopy to easily measure the depth of very deep HAR trenches. The system comprises flexible fiber optic rays, which effectively achieve a ultra-low numerical aperture (NA) during the measurement. This improvement enhances the interference contrast of the reflection spectra. Additionally, a telecentric lens with a camera is used to image the microregion and locate the measurement position. For demonstration, we measured a single trench using the homemade system, and successfully verified that the system can measure structures with a measurable high aspect ratio up to 50:1 and a measurable depth of over 400 μm. Overall, our proposed optical measurement method offers a reliable solution for inspecting the depth of HAR microstructures, enabling improved device performance and process control.
Optical tweezers is one of the commonly used technologies to research on protein force spectroscopy. However, whether optical tweezers system has the capability of force spectroscopy measurement at the molecular scale is vital to single molecule experiments. In this paper, we test the capability of our home-built dual-trap optical tweezers system by stretching polyprotein (NuG2)8 which is made of eight identical tandem repeats of NuG2. With the constant velocity stretching and relaxation mode, we achieve a lot of experimental data and get the contour length increment of (NuG2)8 rapidly from the unfolding processes after fitting these data. The result is consistent with existing reports, which demonstrates optical tweezers system has the force spectroscopy test ability and (NuG2)8 can be used as a new standard sample to evaluate the test performance of optical tweezers. Using polyprotein (NuG2)8 as standard sample has two advantages: stretching polyprotein can help improve the efficiency of data statistics and a large number of experiments can reduce the randomness of the system when testing.
An optical waveguide cantilever sensor is introduced, which is determined by monitoring the coupling efficiency between a waveguide cantilever and a waveguide receptor through the cantilever bending. A straightforward model is developed for an optical waveguide cantilever sensor, in which the coupling efficiency between the cantilever and receptor is calculated using the overlap integral. An effective index is introduced to analyze the thickness of input/output waveguides and cantilever for a maximum coupling with a fiber keeping the single-mode operation. The relationship of the optical waveguide sensor (cantilever, gap, and output waveguide) and the sensitivity is presented. As a consequence, we take an optical waveguide cantilever sensor structure of Si3N4/SiO2/Si as an example, and an optimized design is reported. Moreover, the analysis model is compared with a finite-difference beam propagation method. The result means that our model has a similar accuracy but is more simple, intuitive, and time-saving.
Optical tweezers has shown its significant advantages in applying pico-Newton force on micro beads and handling them with nanometer-level precision, and becomes a powerful tool for single-molecule biology. Many excellent researching results in use of the optical tweezers have been reported. Most of them focus on the single-trap optical tweezers experiments. However, when a single-trap optical tweezers is applied to biological molecule, there is often an obvious noise from the sample chamber holder to which one end of the sample molecule is tethered. In contrast, a dual-trap optical tweezers can intrinsically avoid this problem because both ends of the sample tethered to microspheres are manipulated with two separate optical traps. In order to force the molecule precisely, it is of importance to do calibrations for both traps. Many approaches have been studied to obtain the stiffness and sensitivity of the trap, but those are not quite suitable for making calibration during experiment. Here, we use a modified method of power spectrum density (PSD) for the calibrations of the stiffness and sensitivity of the traps, which combines a sinusoidal motion of the sample stage. The main strength of the method is that the beads used for the calibration also can be used in experiment later. In addition, the calibration can be performed during experiment. Finally, an experiment using a dsDNA molecule to test the system is presented. The results show that the calibration approach for the dual-trap optical tweezers is efficient and accurate.
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