Renovation of Stanford Nanofabrication Facility

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).The project is to renovate the Stanford Nanofabrication Facility (SNF), which is an open-use, shared facility and a participating site in the NSF-funded National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network (NNIN). Since the nanofabrication facility opened in 1987, the SNF's Class 100 clean room (10,500 sq ft) has operated around the clock for 50 weeks per year. With the exception of the annual two-week shutdown, the clean room facility has been used for research and research training 100% of the time. With its heavy usage and the rapidly changing toolbox for nanofabrication, the SNF needs to be renovated and updated to provide the flexibility, reliability, and capacity in nanofabrication that is needed by such a large set of internal and external users conducting research in nanoscience and nanoengineering.The project plan calls for a series of renovation tasks including updating the wet chemical handling capability, renovating the process gas handling and exhaust ventilation systems, updating the electrical distribution, updating the process cooling water, and modernizing the temperature and humidity controls. The research facility space will be updated to include two specialized processing areas, a flexible micromachining room and a nanosynthesis facility. These areas will be used to expand the nanofabrication capability of the SNF and better support interdisciplinary research programs. Examples of nanofabrication activities supporting research goals include fabricating nanostructured electrodes for fundamental studies of electron transfer rates in molecules, production of silicon nanowires for biological sensing, growth of nanowire electrodes for higher performance batteries and fuel cells, and creation of novel nanoelectronics based on carbon nanotubes and graphene.The renovated facility will attract an increasingly broader base of academic and industrial researchers from the physical sciences and the life sciences to SNF, enabling them to address new scientific questions and adopt new approaches to technology development. In 2008 alone, 581 researchers came to the SNF to fabricate nanostructures for their research in electronics, optics, MEMS, NEMS, biology, and chemistry. In a typical month, the SNF serves about 240 researchers, including about 50 from industry and about 20 from other universities. The cross-fertilization of research cultures and pursuit of interdisciplinary science will continue to ignite creativity and innovation in the renovated SNF and enhance the quality of graduate and undergraduate education for student users.