When Hewlett-Packard in Corvallis recently replaced one of its microscopes with a newer model, the company faced the task of finding a home for the old one. The scanning Auger microscope, which is about 10 years old and would cost more than $1 million to buy new today, was donated to the University, and will be up and running in the basement of Willamette Hall beginning this week.
“It was kind of a win-win thing,” Skip Rung, executive director of the Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnologies Institute, said. “Industry needs the absolute latest … so an older machine that’s perfectly good but maybe not quite as fast is a perfect match for a university.”
The scanning Auger microscope focuses on the properties of chemical surfaces by firing electrons into a material and collecting the signal from the very top layer of the material. For example, a less detailed instrument would examine a piece of aluminum foil and find no elements but aluminum, but a microscope that examines surfaces would also note the oxygen molecules collecting on the surface of the aluminum.
“It allows you to look at the composition of matter on a very small scale,” University chemistry professor Dave Johnson said.
Johnson compared the function of the scanning Auger microscope in nanotechnology to the function of an optical microscope in biology.
“When you get down to smaller dimensions, these become your eyes,” he said.
Instruments like the scanning Auger microscope have a variety of uses. Doug Nelson, a field service engineer for Physical Electronics, which manufactured the microscope that Hewlett-Packard donated, said in the 1980s Ford Motor Co. used one to find out why paint wasn’t sticking to the wheels of its vehicles and allowed it to correct the problem.
Johnson saidanother application of surface technology is medicine’s “lab on a chip,” where multiple tests can be simultaneously
conducted on a sample of blood
on a single microchip. Certain
regions of the chip have specific functions, and surface technology allows one to examine whether the regions are performing their
intended functions.
At Hewlett-Packard, which manufactures inkjet printheads, the scanning Auger microscope was used on thin film printheads to analyze the composition of materials and why those materials fail, said Ron DeBord, the company’s analytical lab engineering manager.
“They had people from all over the country wanting this piece of equipment,” Johnson said. “We were fortunate they sent it here because we have CAMCOR set up with world-class people running these pieces of equipment.”
CAMCOR, or the Center for
Advanced Materials Characterization in Oregon, which Johnson
directs, was formed to increase the use of certain technology at the University.
“It was a realization that the University has all this expensive equipment, and in order for it to be affordable, the equipment has to be used a lot,” Johnson said. CAMCOR is a University facility, not a department, so faculty from fields as varied as archaeology and art history, as well as people from industries and other universities, use CAMCOR equipment.
“They have questions that the equipment can answer, so the CAMCOR staff helps those folks,” Johnson said.”CAMCOR has a central facility that’s also open to the state university system and businesses, and we really like that concept,” DeBord said.
Stephen Golledge, CAMCOR’s surface analytical scientist, said the scanning Auger microscope is an important addition to CAMCOR’s collection of machines.
“If someone were to come in knowing about surface analytical techniques, the one thing they’d say we were missing is an Auger,” Golledge said.
The scanning Auger microscope will also be shared with other institutions via ONAMI. ONAMI, formed during the last state legislative session, is a collaboration between the University, Oregon State University, Portland State University and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to facilitate the sharing of scientific equipment.
“It makes no sense to have one of these at each university to be used 10 percent of the time,” Johnson said. He added that scientists from OSU frequently use the University’s equipment, and while PSU scientists don’t visit as often due to the greater travel distance, they sometimes send the University samples to analyze.
Rung, who became involved in higher education after retiring as Hewlett-Packard’s research and development director in 2001, said Hewlett-Packard and ONAMI have worked together in the past.
“Absolutely, they’re one of our key sponsors,” Rung said. Hewlett-Packard has also donated the use of a building in Corvallis to ONAMI.
DeBord praised the relationship between Hewlett-Packard and the University.
“They’ve provided support to us over the years by providing quality students,” he said. “They’ve also done some analysis for us. … It really has been a good relationship.”

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