Resources
The University of Texas at Austin has many physical and intellectual resources that make it a great place to work in acoustics, sensors, and MEMS.
Contains more than 12,000 square feet of Class 100 and Class 1000 cleanroom space for device processing. The MRC is part of the National Science Foundation (NSF) National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI). Within the MRC, our team has established an Active Materials Processing Bay, a Class-1000 bay at containing dedicated wafer spinners and high-temperature furnaces for chemical-solution deposition (CSD) processing of piezoelectric materials. We have also retrofitted sputtering systems to synthesize aluminum nitride (AlN), another piezoelectric material we often use in realizing devices.
Houses several diagnostic tools including those required for X-ray diffraction (XRD) and crystallography measurements of piezoelectric materials.
Acoustical MEMS Test Laboratory
Located on UT's main campus in the EER building, our core lab is equipped with the state-of-art MEMS and integrated circuits testing equipment including oscilloscopes, signal generators, dedicated professional-audio FFT analyzers, white-light interferometers, and scanning laser doppler vibrometers. Design and simulation capabilities are supported by heavy-duty workstations featuring dual-socket Intel Xeon processors (total 22 and 24 cores on each workstation), 128-GB system memories, and high-speed PCI-express-based SSDs for demanding simulations. These computers are equipped with two complimentary finite-element analysis (FEA) capabilities (ANSYS and COMSOL), MATLAB, and 3-D computer-aided design software (Alibre). High-frequency network analyzers enable dielectric characterization of piezoelectric materials.
Acoustics research at UT Austin spans five different colleges. There are twelve acoustics courses in the Cockrell School of Engineering alone. TexasAcoustics.org summarizes acoustics related activity across campus.