You Plan to Do Your Nanofabrication Where? !
Bill Flounders, Ph.D., Executive Director
Berkeley Marvell Nanofabrication Laboratory
ABSTRACT:
The University of California, Berkeley Marvell Nanofabrication Laboratory (NanoLab) is a 15,000 ft2 clean room facility with a wide range of micro and nanofabrication capabilities. The NanoLab is open to any UC academic researcher and has members from across campus as well as visiting scientists from other universities, national laboratories, and local industry. During FY17/18, the NanoLab had over 400 active members representing more than 70 principal investigators and more than 25 affiliate member companies. The laboratory is operated as a university recharge operation. Recharge revenue was $4.5M in FY17/18; this is wholly used to support and sustain existing operations.
The NanoLab has provided select complimentary research capabilities to a wide range of National Laboratory scientists for many years. More recently, the NanoLab has been integrated into the research plans for fabrication of custom deliverables to support high profile joint projects for program sponsors from NASA to the FDA. Reviewers of these larger scale efforts routinely challenge if shared facilities are the appropriate venue to fabricate their custom deliverables while simultaneously recognizing that their programs are unwilling to fund dedicated facilities or commercial contracts to meet their needs. The Berkeley NanoLab, and its predecessor the Berkeley Microlab, have been addressing and contradicting this concern for decades. This talk will provide an overview of the Berkeley NanoLab, its access programs, and its current capabilities. Specific strategies that the NanoLab has developed to minimize downtime and enable process control with multiple users sharing the same equipment will be presented.
BIOGRAPHY:
Albert William (Bill) Flounders is the Executive Director of the UC Berkeley Marvell Nanofabrication Laboratory. He received his BS in Chemical Engineering from the Johns Hopkins University in 1985 and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 1992. His graduate research was primarily conducted in the U.C. Berkeley Microlab and focused upon exposed gate field effect transistors for chemical sensor applications. Bill completed post-doctoral research in immunology at the U.S. Department of Agriculture with an emphasis on immobilization, stabilization, and patterning of antibodies on semiconductor substrates. From 1996 to 2001, Bill was a Senior Member of Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories. Bill’s research program at Sandia developed biosensors for chemical and biological agent detection and custom equipment for wafer-scale biochemical processing.
In 2001, Bill returned to the Berkeley Microlab as the Technology Manager. He provided technical guidance to researchers of the Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center and was the primary laboratory consultant for design and planning of the next generation of the Berkeley Microlab, the Marvell Nanofabrication Laboratory (The NanoLab). The NanoLab opened in 2009, and Bill oversaw the two year transition and start-up of over 150 micro/nanofabrication tools in the new facility. Presently, the Berkeley NanoLab provides research capabilities to over 400 researchers per year representing more than 70 academic principal investigators and more than 25 affiliate member companies, primarily Bay Area technical start-ups.