Projects
Block Copolymer Network Analysis - MATLAB Programming
Objective:
Create a tool that can analyze block copolymer films for their usefulness in nano-circuits.
Explanation:
We can create thin films of a material, block copolymer, that form fingerprint-like patterns on a silicon substrate. These patterns have critical dimensions on the nanometer scale and are thus relevant to the semiconductor industry to make nano-circuits.
In this fingerprint pattern there can be many variations with more branching or disconnected paths, more straight or curving paths, more skinny or wider paths. We can control these factors by the composition of the block copolymer and the processing conditions and we’d like to know what kind of block copolymer film will work best for the nano-circuits that we are building. Therefore, we built the block copolymer analysis program, highlighted here, in MATLAB.
Authors of the Program:
Nathan Feaver, Mark Stoykovich, Ian Campbell
Results:
Program accepts an image from a scanning electron microscope or atomic force microscope image, processes the image to yield maximum contrast and creates a black and white image as well as a skeleton image:
After generating the skeleton image, a second program walks through all possible pathways and calculates:
- Maximum linear and overall distance (connected)
- Average contour length
- Average tortuosity
- Average and local radii of curvature
- Number of branch points
- Number of connections between two parallel planes
These data are quite valuable to determine the number of electron pathways, resistance, and probability of burnout for nanocircuits made with a particular block copolymer composition.
FYI: The picture used for the Projects link on the right shows a block copolymer network that has non-connecting pathways highlighted in various colors!
Because this program was developed in collaboration with others and will be published in the near future, I am unable to share the source code for this project. Look for our publication, coming Winter 2011-2012!
Go Fish - Ruby Programming
I am interested in learning Ruby and Rails programming to work on web application development. To learn the Ruby language I am making the game Go Fish! It is currently in development and I'm working to get a version that is ready to share. The first version will be based in the terminal. The second version I will port to Rails and create a GUI for a version that you can play from my website. I'm currently using Amazon S3 to host this static website, so the Go Fish game will probably be hosted on my home server and will only be available on request.
Let me know if you're excited to play this game and I'll put a higher priority on getting it developed :)
Earth Explorers - WordPress Website
I've been helping the non-profit, Earth Explorers, to get a basic WordPress website off the ground. I've helped them pick out a theme, edit the theme to fit their branding, setup page and linking structure, add widgets to automate internal updating for blog posts and news posts, and automate updates to their social media pages.
Here's a link: Earth Explorers!