Purdue’s MEMS-related fabrication work involved in this proposal will be carried out in the Birck Nanotechnology Center (BNC) of Purdue University that officially opened in October 2005. This is a $58 million facility operated as a recharge center and funded by state support and fees generated by industry and academic usage. The fabrication laboratory, which is housed in 25,000 sq. ft. of class 1000, 100 and 10 clean space, is equipped with state of the art tools for materials preparation and characterization with in-situ diagnostics, epitaxial growth, device fab-rication with feature sizes smaller than 0.1?m, and device characterization. Furthermore, we will use the Bio-MEMS Purdue laboratory that is a unique interdisciplinary laboratory equipped with both engineering tools such as various integrated measurement workstations, LCR meter, scanning laser vibrometer, critical point dryer, various peristaltic and syringe fluidic pumps, a highly sensitive image acquisition and analysis system and others and biomedical tools such as several fluorescent microscopy and image analysis setups, stereo zoom and Nomarki microscopes, in room total UV decontamination setup, BL-2 containment laminar flow hood, centrifuges, both mammalian and bacterial culture incubators, reagents and supplies, micropipets, vortex machine, autoclave, pH and conductivity meters and others. The laboratory also contains tools for polymerbased rapid prototyping and testing.

The Purdue’s RF/microwave laboratory has a comprehensive suite of commercially available electromagnetic and multiphysics simulation tools that span most of the widely used numerical modeling techniques including Finite Element Method (Ansoft HFSS), Moment Method (Agilent Momentum and Sonnet), 3D multiphysics and MEMS modeling (ANSYS and FEMLAB) and system-level simulation (Agilent ADS). In addition, a 64-process Beowulf Opteron cluster sup-ports large scale parallel computations, and will be used in this project. Furthermore, Purdue University Computer Center (PUCC) supports large scale computing through an 80 node IBM SP cluster with 272 processors as well as numerous PC clusters for student use.
The RF/Microwave laboratory also includes state-of-the-art measurement equipment including an Agilent 8510xf that enables submillimeter wave measurements up to 110 GHz with in a single coax connection. Furthermore, we have installed an environmentally controlled probe station capable of characterizing (RF, static and dynamic) MEMS devices under a variety of gases (vacuum, dry air, nitrogen, etc.) and temperature (4K up to + 150?C) from DC to 40 GHz.