LOW POWER, HIGH SENSITIVITY, ELEC OLFACTORY SENSORS

Not Available Composite materials offer significant benefits for the next generation of lithography tools, including dramatic improvements in weight, vibrational stability, and thermal stability. These advantages lead to higher stage speeds, reduced settling times, improved positional accuracies, and overall throughput improvements. Graphite epoxy composites have been looked at for these applications. They provide several benefits, however, they have thermal and temporal instability issues which limit their applicability to this problem. SSG proposes the application of an innovative silicon carbide composite material. This SiC composite has superior bulk material properties, and most importantly, it has no epoxy binders, and therefore no issues with moisture absorption or long term stability. Based on its SiC technology, SSG has been funded by Silicon Valley Group Lithography for design studies and prototype fabrication of reticle platens for an existing lithography tool. The Phase I effort proposed will build off of this work in order to refine the fabrication processes associated with this application. Performance and cost are both critical in transitioning this material into the commercial arena, as a result much of the Phase I effort will focus on applying new and novel fabrication approaches to the composite material in order to reduce cost. A modified matrix infiltration approach may be able to provide 80% cost savings, while only moderately effecting material propert