The chip shown was designed by two undergraduates in their senior year (1998), Alper Kiraz (now a professor at Koç University) and Alaeddin Aydıner (now works for Intel in Santa Clara, CA) and fabricated by MOSIS. It has eight optical sensors and eight transimpedance amplifers. As seen in the microscope image, the square-shaped optical sensors are along the diagonal of the chip. This chip was used to detect the vertical position of eight parallel interdigital-cantilever AFM tips using a laser illumination. The chip was designed in the framework of a DARPA supported project: “Scanning Probe arrays and custom electronics” DARPA Contract no: F30602-97-2-0103. The research results were published in a paper: T. Sulchek, R.J. Grow, G.G. Yaraloglu, S.C. Minne, C.F. Quate, S.R. Manalis, A. Kiraz, A. Aydiner, and A. Atalar, “Parallel atomic force microscopy with optical interferometric detection”, Applied Physics Letters, 78, pp. 1787-1789 (2001)
