This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will design, fabricate and test parallel coaxial evanescent microwave probes (EMP) with integrated piezoelectric actuators and neuromorphic electronics. EMP is being developed and commercialized by MICC in collaboration with researchers at Case Western Reserve University for a variety of imaging applications including thin film quality control, semiconductor characterization, biological studies, and other applications in metrology. EMPs have very fast scan rates (>1 cm/s) and they yield information regarding the dielectric constant as well as the microwave conductivity of materials. They are also non-contact with the capability of imaging both conducting and insulating materials. Integration of actuators and neuromorphic electronics with EMP's will enable their development in manufacturing quality assessment and other high throughput applications. EMPs have very high spatial resolutions (=0.1 um -100 um and in some cases atomic resolution) and their application in manufacturing will have significant impact on quality control and assessment. The possible market for such a system is in multi-billion US dollars per year in the US alone. The proposed parallel EMP arrays will be tested using a mock pulsed-laser deposition set-up at MICC.
