Gizmos and Other Widgets

Many times we make things that are of sufficiently limited appeal that it does not warrant making catalog pages. We present some of those "weird and wonderful" gizmos here. These gizmo images are for sparking an idea for discussion. Perhaps you have an idea to discuss with us.
Contact us. We would love to hear from you.

A custom Probe Station for analysis of 2" wafers. Capable of operation at up to 1000°C in up to one atmosphere of pure oxygen, the system includes both fully automated and manual probe positioners, a viewport for observation with a high resolution optical microscope, water-cooled jackets to contain thermal radiation and multiple temperature sensors. It also has capability to add 2 additional probes and actuators. See Probe Stations for more details.

A custom XYZ manipulator with 6" (150 mm) clear bore, ±2.0" (±50 mm) XY travel and 8" (200 mm) Z travel, fully motorized. Similar manipulators with manual actuation have also been built. The large lateral offset required extra large plates to allow for bellows deflection.

Shown is a custom receiver with LN2 cooling, e-beam heating, multiple electrical contacts for a STM sample holder. It includes ±5° tilt, ±10° azimuthal rotation, continuous 360° polar rotation and has a Faraday cup for beam characterization.

This 3" Mo wafer holder is moved from a load lock to a heated, rotating holder via a magnetic transfer arm. Despite the relatively heavy Mo plate, the "gripper" is able to hold it securely and reliably.

Starting from the base, this 7-axis manipulator has ±0.5" XY travel, 360° rotation, a second ±0.5" XY travel, ±5° tilt topped off with 1" of axial travel. The ID is 5.8" all the way through.

A cryo insert with baffles is shown with access tubes for instrumentation wires. In use, a small chamber, not shown, is attached to the far flange. The sample is mounted within this chamber and the whole assembly is lowered into a liquid helium dewar. The baffles and all the tubes are extra-thin wall to minimize boil-off of the helium. Overall length is approximately 46".

A field emission manipulator was custom designed to allow very fine angular and axial positioning of the tip, via computer control. This operates in the 10^-10 torr range and is bakeable.

A "round house" style sample transfer device, this allows the user to withdraw the sample from one of many ports around a circle, rotate and then extend the sample to another position. These have been made with up to 30" (75cm) travel.

When attached to an existing rotating wafer holder, this device harnesses the rotary motion to provide continuous ± 60° of tilt to allow uniform coating of 3-D structures.

This is a precision, 2 axis gimbal tilt, with ±5° motion integrated into a 3" (75mm) stroke axial translator.

A rotating holder, with 0.001° resolution, for angle resolved detection of charged particles.

These 4" ID vibration dampers were used to connect roughing pumps to an extremely high-resolution Scanning Tunneling Microscope system. More information.

A LN2-cooled sample receiver with ±92° degrees of azimuthal rotation. Due to efficient thermal conductivity from the dewar and good isolation from everything else, the sample holder plate (not shown, see top photo on this page) was cooled to 89K in ~30 minutes. Obviously, the OFHC block shown cooled much more quickly.

In addition to our broad line of standard scientific products, we at McAllister Technical Services know that the customer needs choices and options to fulfill the ever-changing demands of the scientific community. We are committed to providing those options. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions, comments or suggestions.