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We highlight some stability issues in high-surface-area and high-aspect ratio gold nanostructures fabricated using inorganic adhesion layers on silica substrates. We ascribe these problems to capillary and surface effects and show the use of organic silane self-assembled monolayers to improve the long-term stability of such structures.

Resist removal is an essential step for multi-layer lithography processes where a clean and contamination-free surface is essential to avoid shadow etching patterns from resist leftovers. We show that a short \mathrm{O_2} plasma exposure followed by a full NMP solution cycle removes the resist fully and leaves the surface contamination free.

In this report I monitor a full successful cycle of critical point drying (CPD) run for drying MEMS sensors after wet release using KOH etching. The pressure and temperature of the CPD tool (Tousimis) is monitored during the process and plotted in a P-T diagram with \mathrm{CO_2} critical point. A few notes for higher yield in the drying process are mentioned in this report as well.

Here we present our study of the stress dependence in Al thin films on deposition conditions. We consider two types of Al 100-nm thick films: E-beam evaporated films and films obtained by magnetron sputtering. We investigate the Al film stress hysteresis in the environment with slowly increasing and decreasing temperature, i.e. during the gradual annealing. We consider the effect of deposition temperature on the film stress and grain size. We conclude that the annealing of ...

A few important points in data conversion and mask processing of multilayered Ebeam lithography is discussed. The conversion is done using Layout Beamer software at EPFL CMi cleanroom.