Professor Cui’s Waterloo Nanofabrication Group is among the largest in Canada in the area of nanofabrication and clean room research.  His highly qualified personnel (HQP) gain hands-on experience in state-of-the-art clean rooms.  They are trained in: lithography – electron beam, focused ion beam, nanoimprint and photolithography; thin film deposition – evaporation, atomic layer deposition, plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition, sputtering, electro-deposition; thin film etching – ICP RIE, deep silicon etching, and wet chemical etching.  Additionally, students are trained with material/structure/device characterization facilities: scanning electron microscope, helium ion microscope, atomic force microscope.   Though HQP focus their research in nanofabrication, they gain valuable experience in their device application areas as well; students working on nano-structured surface plasmon devices routinely use FDTD software (finite difference time domain) to design the device, and optical property measurement setup (spectrometer etc.) to characterize the device.

His HQP are among the heaviest users of the G2N, QNF, and Watlab on campus.  They are well suited for industries working in organic light emitting devices, flat panel display, silicon or organic solar cells, coating of functional materials, microfluidic/MEMS lab-on-chip systems, biomedical devices (e.g., micro-needles for drug delivery or allergy testing), and the Internet of Things (sensor technology).