Interdisciplinarity, biology & micro-nanotechnologies

guillaume — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 09:45:45 +0000

The convergence between technological and natural objects at the micro- and nanoscale has been long emphasized, including by Stanley Fields ¹ whose declaration has become famous:

Because technology provides the tools and biology the problems, the two should enjoy a happy marriage.

Although this statement is awfully simplistic, biology and technology do enjoy a happy marriage, and I was thrilled to experience it during the last three years. My Ph.D work has been very interdisciplinary and I wanted to dedicate a special section of my thesis to how cool, yet difficult, it is to work at the crossroads of biology, chemistry, physics & technology. Because an image is worth a thousand words, I assembled a nice comparison of various reference biological objects and technological devices at the micro- and nanoscale. Most of the images I used were available on Wikimedia Commons and I made the others.

Biological and technological scales compared

The source file is vector graphics, i.e. it can be resized at will without loss of quality or pixelation. It is released under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license, which means you are free to use it, modify it, redistribute it for any purpose as long as you appropriately attribute it, and that you distribute any derivative works only under the same license.

Notes

Stanley Fields, The interplay of biology and technology, PNAS, August 28, 2001, 98 (18), 10051-10054; doi: 10.1073/pnas.191380098; full text ↩

Cleanroom guided tour

guillaume — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 19:42:28 +0000

I currently work in the Laboratory for analysis and architecture of systems (Laboratoire d’analyse et d’architectures des systèmes, LAAS) in Toulouse, France. It has recently been seriously extended with two news buildings, one of which is hosting the brand new technological facility. It is mainly composed of a 1500-m² cleanroom used to assemble micro- and nanosystems in a dust-free environment.

Inauguration

This new cleanroom was recently inaugurated by political representatives. As the official photographer for this event, I also had the opportunity to take a few pictures of the facility itself and its equipment. I released them under a free license and uploaded them to Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository.

Opening ceremony

Sample gallery

All these pictures can especially be used to illustrate the relevant articles in Wikipedia, such as Thermal oxidation or Plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition. And once a media file is on Wikimedia Commons, it can be used across all Wikimedia projects, such as Wikipedia in Russian or in Japanese.

Etching tanks

Steppers under inactinic light

Molecular beam epitaxy device

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