The Waterloo Engineering Endowment Foundation (WEEF) has been a long-time, strong supporter of the Nanotechnology Engineering program. It continued that support in the Spring 2018 term with a very generous and appreciated contribution towards hardware that will provide NE students with more state-of-the-art equipment and opportunities to develop their knowledge of the nanoscale world.
WEEF contributed $37,828 towards the purchase of the following equipment for the Nanotechnology Engineering undergraduate student labs:
- Two New Atomic Force Microscopes. With additional Atomic Force Microscopes in the lab, students will have more opportunity to develop hands-on experience using this state-of-the-art technology to characterize material and quality-control their products.
- Hardware for Nano Engineering Days. The pilot Nanotechnology Engineering Days event, scheduled for 1B students in Winter 2019, will provide students with an opportunity to design, assemble and test a scanning tunneling microscope (STM), requiring the integration of their knowledge of electric circuits, programming and calculus to design and build a working prototype of an STM.
- Potentiostat for Electrical Impedance Spectroscopy. Electrochemical testing using potentiostats, which can control electrical parameters such as voltage or current while measuring electrical responses from electrochemical reactions, is important for many engineering applications and a large amount of research in nanotechnology utilizes it. Students will gain hands-on experience using this important technology.
- MA-8005 Manipulators (DC Probes). Students will use these new, very precisely controlled manipulators to measure the sheet resistance for different semiconductor devices.
WEEF was founded in 1990 by two engineering students with the goal of continuously improving the educational environment for undergraduate engineering students and maintaining the university’s outstanding reputation. WEEF collects donations from students, employer matching programs and engineering alumni into a fund and uses interest on the money to purchase material to support the Faculty of Engineering undergraduate programs.