Physical Electronics Lab, Baskin Engineering Room 162

• Maximum Number of Students per Section: 10
• Recommended Students per Section: 10 or less
• Number of Lab Stations: varies (see below)
• Lab Stations in Brief:
  1 Low Temperature/Hall Effect Station
  1 Seebeck Effect Setup
  2 Semiconductor Probe Stations
  (DC Measurements)
  4 High Temperature Resistance Stations
  1 Optical Absorption Station

General Description

This a special class laboratory used for student design work in support of semiconductor courses. Lab is equipped with 8 lab benches, with the stations and equipment listed below.

Lab access is restricted to instructor or TA attended hours since some equipment in the lab can be dangerous to unaware students. Access to lab is via the main corridor of Jack Baskin Engineering Building with doorway adjacent to the coffee cart. Door has an electronic combination lock (Omnilock) installed. Teaching Assistants and Instructors are issued their own keycode, which must be kept secure from others. Electronic lock tracks access by all.

General purpose computer workstations for are typically made available in the next-door labs (21 in BE-104; Logic Design Lab and 10 in BE-161; EM/RF Lab). Keycodes for those labs are generally given to course enrolled students using the Physical Electronics Lab.

Lab Safety and Security Rules

1. No Food or Drink is permitted in the lab. Exception are only for sealed water bottles and lunches kept within your backpacks. This rule is needed to protect expensive equipment and to protect people from ingesting hazardous materials. Often soldering, gluing and other fabrication may take place in the lab. These activities leave small amounts of materials behind which would not be good to ingest.

2. Enrolled students for course only allowed in lab. Do not let other students into lab. Lab is reserved for the exclusive use of students enrolled in the course and for students that have made prior arrangements with BELS and faculty for use of the lab.

3. Use Extreme Caution with Equipment in Lab
Some equipment in lab can cause injury. Specifically the low temperature station is operated using high pressure, high purity nitrogen gas. The Hall Effect Station has a large electromagnetic which is run from high voltage high current DC power source. The electromagnetic also requires water cooling to operate.

Course List

Typical courses: EE145L

Lab Equipment & Facilities

Lab Setups, Experiments or Workstations

(2 each) Semiconductor Probe Stations (with Microscopes)
Cascade Microtech, 3 axis (x,y,z)
Two high resolution, 100TPI poisitions with DC probes
Olympus SZ4060 Stereo Zoom Microscope with TV Camera mount (no TV camera)
6.3:1 zoom
150 watt fiber optic light source

(1 each)

This system cools semiconductor samples to 70 degrees Kelvin. This is done using a micro miniature refrigerator which is a small, cryogenic refrigerator that derives its cooling power from the Joule-Thomson expansion of a high pressure gas. This effect is amplified by using the cooled gas to pre-cool incoming gas in a counter-current heat exchanger. Temperatures down to 70 K can be achieved in devices a little larger than a matchbox in size. Typically the cold stage is a ceramic pad 14 mm x 10 mm in size supplied with a temperature sensor and resistive heater.

System in lab consists of
MMR Technologies Refrigerator with Semiconductor Sample
MMR Technologies K-20 Programmable Temperature Controller with RS-232 connection to PC
99.999% Dry Nitrogen Gas Cylinder with Gas lines to refrigerator sample.
Vacuum pump for evacuate air around sample for temperature insulation.
3 each HP34401A Digital Multimeters with GPIB connection to PC
1 each HPE3631A Digital DC power supply with GPIB connection to PC
1 each, HP6674A 0-60v; 0-35A, DC Power Supply, with GPIB connection to PC
FW Bell 9550 Gauss/Teslameter with transverse (HTF-99-0608) and axial (SAF99-1808) probes
Walker Scientific Water-cooled Electromagnet (Model HV-1H)
Pentium Computer with GPIB card, National Instruments Labview and MMR K-20 Software.

(1 each) Seebeck Experiment Setup
MMR's SB-100 Seebeck System allows users to make automatic measurements of the temperature dependent Seebeck potential of metals, semiconductors and other electrically conductive samples over a temperature range from 80 K to 400 K, and from 200K to 730K. Sample mounting is simple permitting rapid interchange of samples. The Seebeck system is compatible with a variety of computers through an IEEE-488 (GPIA) or RS-232 interface. The MMR Programmable Seebeck Measurement System includes the SB-100 Programmable Seebeck controller, the K-20 Programmable Temperature Controller, the Seebeck Thermal Stage and accessories, a computer (PC), and MMR supplied software.

(1 each) Optical Absorption Experiment Setup
Consisting of Thermo-Oriel
Merlin Radiometry System (model 68931),
300 Watt Radiometric power and light source (Model 66884)
Cornerstone 130 Motorized 1/8m monochromator (model 74000)
Amplified Silicon Detector Heads (Model 70316)
TRACQ32 Software for PC
National Instruments Labview software

(4 each) Resistive Coil Experimental Setups
This setup uses a 24AWG wire coil wrapped around a test tube. Test tube is placed in a hot water bath. Students measure how temperature effects the resistance of the wire.

(10 each) Solid State Model Kits (from Institute for Chemical Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Common Lab Equipment
(1) Laserprinter, HP Laserjet 4000N (BE-162 Print)
(1) Lockable cabinet for TA supplies
(2) white boards.

Optional Equipment (shared with other labs, not always available)
Solder Irons
Miniature Drill Press
Microscopes
Surface Mount Soldering Stations