Graduate student Mohammad Naraghi, under the direction of Professor Ioannis Chasiotis, has taken a first place at Sandia National Lab's University Alliance competition

4/10/2013 Written by Semiconductor Online (Erie, Pa., May 16)

A team from Illinois, led by student Mohammad Naraghi and under the direction of aerospace engineering professor Ioannis Chasiotis, has taken a first place at Sandia National Laboratories' third annual University Alliance competition for student microel

Written by Written by Semiconductor Online (Erie, Pa., May 16)

A team from Illinois, led by student Mohammad Naraghi and under the direction of aerospace engineering professor Ioannis Chasiotis, has taken a first place at Sandia National Laboratories' third annual University Alliance competition for student microelectromechanical systems designs. Naraghi’s design was entered in a new competition category that called for a micro design that would reliably inspect nanoscale phenomena. The Illinois device featured a mechanical testing platform capable of generating tens of micronewtons of force on highly deformable nanofibers, with a total displacement of 100 micrometers measurable by an integrated folded leaf spring-loaded cell.

This (University Alliance) competition is an opportunity for universities around the country to participate in an experience that incorporates all the intricate details of design, analysis, and fabrication of complex MEMS devices, says Mark Platzbecker, technical team lead in Sandia’s MEMS Core Technologies Dept. The work conducted at UIUC was supported in part by the U.S. Army Research Office under grant number W911NF-06-1-0356 with Dr. B. LaMattina as the program manager, and by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under NSF-NIRT grant DMI-0532320.


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This story was published April 10, 2013.