The School of Electrical Engineering at Cornell University will purchase Scanning Tunneling Microscope equipment and software which will be dedicated to support research in engineering. The equipment will be used for several research projects, including in particular: the NSF sponsored project "Microdynamics and Nanodynamics: Materials Structure and Devices: the Semiconductor Research Corporation project, "Massively Parallel Electron Beam Architecture for Electron Beam Lithography; and a DARPA sponsored project (with Raytheon) on RF Vacuum Microelectronics. All these projects use 20 nm diameter silicon tips or arrays of silicon tips to produce tunneling microscope devices or to produce field emitter arrays for electron beam instrumentation, or vacuum microelectronic devices. We have designed a unique nanoelectromechanical instrument: a high-speed (5 MHz) scanning tunneling device to be used to make unique sensors to detect sound, radiation, mass, pressure, and acceleration. The Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM) equipment and software requested in this proposal will be used to drive our nanoelectromechanical tunneling devices and to characterize the tip formation processed for both silicon field and tunneling tip structures.
