AI Weirdness: the strange side of machine learning

Tag: scanning electron microscope

Total 75 Posts
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Fracture patterns at the edge of a broken wafer (broken on purpose, for once).  The lighter top layer is silicon, and the darker bottom layer is glass.  The glass looks darker than the silicon because it’s a better electrical insulator - the electron beam microscope makes an image by
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Microscopic fracture patterns appear clifflike on the edge of one of my samples.  This entire view is less than 10 micrometers high, meaning that it covers about a tenth the thickness of a typical human hair.  We usually don’t get patterns like these, because we use a special wafer
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The crazy-huge mountains of the nanoworld!  The strange waves and scallops are what is left of the protective mask I used to shield the semiconductor material below from a high-energy etching plasma.  The mask held up to the plasma, although it was probably damaged a bit - and then I
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A mini-monument, made of semiconductor laser material.  It looks to me a bit like Devil’s Tower.  It’s much, much smaller, though.  Scaling this little nano-tower (600nm high) to the height of Devil’s Tower (386m high) would be like scaling up an average-sized human (~1.7m) to about
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Coastline of the land of monuments… tiny monuments.  Each of them would fit easily inside a single human cell.  They’re formed out of semiconductor, and are the result of what we call micromasking: tiny bits of debris landed on the semiconductor before the etching step, and protected the semiconductor
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This one looked to me like a line of people, standing at attention.  It’s actually an edge-on view of a comb-like grating structure, seen here as it passes between two rectangular alignment markers.  The people-like shape is due to the weird way the plasma etcher ate away the semiconductor,
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Frostlike patterns emerge when acetone partially dissolves a plasticy layer of old photoresist.  This is the same sample as in my previous post [http://tmblr.co/ZP7VLs_nDmsM], which used to be covered in jagged black mountains made of plasma-damaged photoresist. Now the mountains are mostly dissolved away, except for
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This image is from a test of our plasma etcher, and shows a white plain of semiconductor laser material etched partially away by plasma.  In the background is the black remains of photoresist that was protecting other areas of semiconductor from being etched - it did the job, but took
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A strange miniature landscape, none of which is supposed to be there.  It’s quite small indeed - the pinnacles are each less than 1 micrometer tall, which means you’d need to stack a thousand of them on top of each other to equal one millimeter. This landscape is
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Standing at the edge of the world. At microscopic scales, even a clean break isn’t very clean - this electron microscope picture is of the edge of a piece of glass, on which I had fabricated a long wall of semiconductor (the long columned wall you see at the
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