Grant: Research Tools and Instruments

The University of Waterloo is an international leader in digital X-ray technology having facilitated the invention of, among other devices, one of the world's highest-spatial-resolution digital X-ray imager having a pixel pitch of under 10 microns, more then 10X smaller than a comparable commercially available state-of-the-art X-ray imaging device. New applications are poised to emerge for this ultra-high resolution X-ray imager in fields such as macromolecular crystallography, medical imaging, non-destructive testing of semiconductor components, and biotech research. Key leaders at the Canadian Light Source (CLS) beam line and the U.S. National Labs synchrotron facility have already expressed keen interest in using these high-resolution detectors to explore new applications. This proposal requests a state-of-the-art 0.25 um focal spot X-ray source capable of (1) characterizing these world-first ultra-high resolution digital X-ray imagers during the engineering prototype development phase and (2) undertaking new scientific imaging tasks using the novel X-ray detector in the fields of new materials (including nano materials). The characterization equipment will be housed in the university-level Giga-to-Nanoelectronics (G2N) facility and will be accessible to all G2N lab users (45 annually from across ten departments) as well as prominent local digital imaging industry such as Teledyne DALSA and ON Semiconductor. The PI and co-applicants are training over 30 HQPs annually and it is expected that at least half of these will be trained annually on X-ray and digital imager characterization using the proposed infrastructure. To date, graduates from the relevant research programs have found employment at Teledyne DALSA, GE Healthcare, Apple, ON Semiconductor, US FDA, Omnivision, Christie Digital, Ignis, and two have started their own company.