A combined process of nanoimprint lithography and dual‐side aligned photolithography to address misalignment of subsequent layers for the fabrication of SiNx nanoporous membrane filters (SiNx nanofilter) is suggested. Here, in one process, 21 SiNx nanofilter chips are fabricated on a 6 inch Si wafer by aligning nanopore area of nanofilter and template area of nanofilter chip. An SiNx nanofilter chip‐integrated fluidic device is used to test the purification ability of the nanofilter in terms of its pore size and surface hydrophobicity or hydrophilicity. This is the first attempt at separating unnecessary chemical residues from a mixed reactant solution by nanoscale purification process using the tremendous number of nanoholes in the nanofilter. After purification by the nanofilter, high efficiency and narrow‐band Cs3MnBr5 phosphor is synthesized by evaporative crystallization. Here, the photoluminescent quantum yield (PLQY) of the purified Cs3MnBr5 phosphor is monitored to evaluate the purification ability of the SiNx nanofilter. The highest PLQY (53%) of Cs3MnBr5 green phosphors is obtained by purification of reactant solution using nanofilter with 50 nm nanopore diameter and hydrophilic surface. This combined process proves its potential for scalable manufacturing of complex designed SiNx nanofilter chips for chemical species sieving and other applications.
Tangent flow-driven ultrafiltration (TF-UF) is an efficient isolation process of milk exosomes without morphological deformation. However, the TF-UF approach with micro-ultrafiltration SiN x membrane filters suffers from the clogging and fouling of microultrafiltration membrane filter pores with large bioparticles. Thus, it is limited in the long term, continuous isolation of large quantities of exosomes. In this work, we introduced electrophoretic oscillation (EPO) in the TF-UF approach to remove pore clogging and fouling of with micro-ultrafiltration SiN x membrane filters by large bioparticles. As a result, the combined EPO-assisted TF (EPOTF) filtration can isolate large quantities of bovine milk exosomes without deformation. Furthermore, several morphological and biological analyses confirmed that the EPOTF filtration approach could isolate the milk exosomes in high concentrations with high purity and intact morphology. In addition, the uptake test of fluorescent-labeled exosomes by the keratinocyte cells visualized the biological function of purified exosomes. Hence, compared to the TF-UF process, the EPOTF filtration produced a higher yield of bovine milk exosomes without stopping the filtering process for over 200 h. Therefore, this isolation process enables scalable and continuous production of morphologically intact exosomes from bovine milk, suggesting that high-quality exosome purification is possible for future applications such as drug nanocarriers, diagnosis, and treatments.
Area-selective atomic layer deposition (AS-ALD) of insulating
metallic
oxide layers could be a useful nanopatterning technique for making
increasingly complex semiconductor circuits. Although the alkanethiol
self-assembled monolayer (SAM) has been considered promising as an
ALD inhibitor, the low inhibition efficiency of the SAM during ALD
processes makes its wide application difficult. We investigated the
deposition mechanism of Al2O3 on alkanethiol-SAMs
using temperature-dependent vibrational sum-frequency-generation spectroscopy.
We found that the thermally induced formation of gauche defects in
the SAMs is the main causative factor deteriorating the inhibition
efficiency. Here, we demonstrate that a discontinuously temperature-controlled
ALD technique involving self-healing and dissipation of thermally
induced stress on the structure of SAM substantially enhances the
SAM’s inhibition efficiency and enables us to achieve 60 ALD
cycles (6.6 nm). We anticipate that the present experimental results
on the ALD mechanism on the SAM surface and the proposed ALD method
will provide clues to improve the efficiency of AS-ALD, a promising
nanoscale patterning and manufacturing technique.
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