Viewing posts for the category Ultrasensitive Instrument Design
This is for for a scanning surface potential measurement tool, used in contamination detection in semiconductors: 40 attocoulomb sensitivity in a 4 MHz bandwidth
This one is in cooperation with the Kuno biochemistry group at Notre Dame—A front end for picosecond spectroscopy with a filtered supercontinuum source. The interesting part about this one is that it has to have good cancellation performance down to about 10 nA, about 1000 times less than the original noise canceller or the New Focus Nirvana (which is closely modelled on my original design, except that mine is 40 times faster).
This was a prototype of a transcutaneous (through-the-skin) sensor for blood glucose and blood alcohol.
A bit of a departure from our usual fare: a low cost, high speed sensor for detecting blood spots in eggs using spectral differencing. I'm going to be doing the firmware as well as the optics and electronics, and this will be the first actual client work for our newly qualified PCB designer, Magdalen.
Latest: Work began in early October; progress to date has been encouraging but (due to resource constraints) not quite as fast as we'd like.