Understanding crystal structures and crystal planes help engineers, technicians, and designers develop processes and choose materials that yield effective, long-lasting microsystems. It also helps one to better understand the processes and the desired outcomes - information that is needed to identify, troubleshoot and solve problems that may occur during the process of building a microsystem.
In this topic you explore concepts related to crystallography and their applications in microsystem technology. You observe, study and demonstrate several concepts related to crystallography and bulk micromachining. This topic includes the following activities.
- The Miller Index Activity - This activity provides the tools to navigate within a crystal and identify the planes of the crystal using Miller notation. (Miller notation utilizes the Cartesian coordinate system.)
- Breaking Wafers Activity - This activity applies destructive testing to learn more about crystal structures and how crystals such as diamonds use different cleavage planes to produce multi-faceted jewels and how microtechnology uses crystal planes to fabricate specific shapes such as pressure chambers and microfluidic channels.
- Bulk Micromachining - An Etch Process Activity - This activity uses an actual pressure sensor process chip to demonstrate and observe the anisotropic etching of silicon in a sodium hydroxide solution. (Personal protective equipment as well as a fume hood are required to complete this activity.)
SCME's "Crystallography Kit" supports some of the activities in this topic.
SCME's "Bulk Micromachining Kit" supports the Bulk Micromachining Activity.
The concepts taught in this topic can be applied to mathematics, physics, chemistry, earth science, material science, electronics, engineering, and micro and nanotechnologies.
