Publication
The general idea of Nanotechnology is not new – it has been studied since Nobel laureate Richard Feynman outlined the idea in a speech in 1959 – but it's only recently that the progress carried out in the various fields of material, optic, physic and engineering have allowed scientists to make Feynman's vision comes true. A large part of tools used to interact with nanoscale structures are based on scanning probes technology founded with the invention of the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) by Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer of IBM's Zurich Lab in 1981. The working principle is based on a micro-lever carrying a probe on its end which is brought in proximity of the sample to be manipulated/studied. The deflection of the lever induced by the atomic forces in the vicinity of the sample is measured by a sensor, allowing the reconstruction of the desired information, be it topographical information or information about the nature of the sample (DNA molecule identification, etc.). Today, the scanning probe microscope (SPM) technologies based on individual probe have reached their limit, principally by the slow data acquisition frames rate due to the intrinsic sequential readout of these systems. This last decade, great deals of efforts have been carried out for developing multiprobes SPM in order to increase range and acquisition speed. One obvious path is to make multiple cantilever probes on one chip which are controlled independently and coupled with a multiplexed cantilever detection method. Developed in linear or in 2D configurations, manufactured starting from very diverse materials and coupled with a large range of sensors, the scanning probes devices extend nowadays their applicability to many different domains, starting from the observation to the direct interaction with nanoscale structures. However, an important limitation appears when using multiprobes SPM with multiplexed integrated sensors. Indeed, as density of probes increases, number of contacts and interconnections wires increase and space for the leads decrease as much. Moreover, this contributes to enhance the complexity of the parallel electronics interface which is preferably wanted based on standard CMOS process. With regards to these limitations, current studies and development depict a limit up to 100 × 100 probes/mm2. This thesis presents an entirely new approach with the promise to break several of theses barriers and is to our knowledge the first successful experiment which shows how to overcome the interconnection limit. The setup proposed here separates physically an entirely passive probes array, without any electrical correction, from massively parallel CMOS standard readout electronics. The key idea is the readout of a Scanning Probes Microscope (SPM) array by Digital Holographic Microscopy (DHM). This technology directly gives phase information at each pixel of a CCD array. This means that no contact line to each individual SPM probe is needed. The data is directly