OTHER ELECTRONICS & NANOTECHNOLOGY INUDSTRY
UPDATE
January 2013
McIlvaine Company
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Motorola to Close Chennai Assembly Facility
Carnegie Mellon Receives Funding for Energy Building
NIST Cleanroom Will Facilitate Processes, Improvements
TeraDiode Building Manufacturing Center
The Center for Coatings Application Research and Education
EV Group Completes Cleanroom Expansion
Motorola Mobility, owned by Google Inc., has decided to indefinitely suspend operations at its phone assembly and packaging unit in Chennai. The move was part of the company's effort to streamline global supply chain.
The closure will come into effect from February next year and is expected to affect 76 employees. The Chennai unit was started in 2008 with an investment of Rs.172 crore.
"Yesterday we started informing our 76 employees of our plans to suspend operations as of end February, 2013. We have no current or forecast production requirements that would require the continued use of our Chennai facility," The Hindu quoted William Moss, director for communications in Asia Pacific, Motorola Mobility, as saying over phone.
"However, we want to stress that our other centers in India will continue to operate. We are working with our colleagues to settle all dues, provide relief packages and to help them find other opportunities."
The announcement about the Chennai unit comes a day after Google announced that Singapore-based Flextronics would acquire Motorola's manufacturing operations in Tianjin, China, and would also assume the management and operation of its Jaguariuna, Brazil, facility. Employees and assets at both locations will transfer to Flextronics after the transaction closes.
The agreement between Motorola and Flextronics also includes a manufacturing and services agreement for Android and other mobile devices. The companies expect to complete closing activities by the first half of 2013.
Carnegie Mellon University has received a $2 million grant from the Eden Hall Foundation to expand its research capacity in a new energy building, which will include a 10,000 sq. ft. cleanroom facility, slated to house scholars focused on improving energy efficiency and developing novel sustainable energy sources.
The 100,000 sq. ft. Sherman & Joyce Bowie Scott Hall will house wet and dry laboratories, collaborative workspaces, office spaces, and a café. The building also will be home to the newly announced Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation at CMU.
"The lab spaces supported by Eden Hall are crucial for Carnegie Mellon faculty and students working on advanced problems in energy and biomedical engineering that all have the potential for generating ideas that will lead to future economic growth in western Pennsylvania," says CMU President Jared L. Cohon. "We are grateful to the Eden Hall Foundation for their generous support of this facility, which we hope and expect, will be extremely valuable to our region."
The Scott Institute will support teams of CMU engineers, scientists, economists, architects, policy specialists, and others that will tackle a wide range of issues including more efficient energy solutions to reduce carbon emissions, smart grid energy research, and development of new advanced materials and processes to produce and store energy more efficiently and economically.
“There is an acute need for energy-related workers by the end of this decade, and that's why we are supporting education and research programs now under way at CMU that will help our region grow and provide increased economic opportunities to the region,” says Sylvia Fields, executive director of the Pittsburgh-based Eden Hall Foundation, which was established in the 1930s by H.J. Heinz Co. executive Sebastian Mueller.
CMU researchers have successfully created energy sector innovations, from helping California provide electricity without greenhouse gas emissions to helping secure the U.S. power grid from cyber attacks.
"We look forward to using this grant to support our ongoing goal of developing technologies for the future and for promoting the growth of knowledge workers as we seek to energize the U.S. manufacturing sector," says Gary Fedder, head of CMU's Institute for Complex Engineered Systems (ICES) and a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. "Without this kind of financial support, it would be difficult to equip our new labs with the tools we need to continue our cutting-edge work."
The Sherman & Joyce Bowie Scott Hall is scheduled for completion by 2015.
The staff at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Boulder, Colo., is used to working in cobbled-together cleanroom facilities. The Quantum Electronics and Photonics Division, which concentrates on microfabrication, nanofabrication, and related efforts, have endured a series of space adjustments since the campus's first cleanroom was created in 1971. By the turn of the century, the team’s much-renovated 5,000-ft2 cleanroom was showing its age.
Today, the group is enjoying the enhanced capabilities of a state-of-the-art, Class 100 cleanroom space: 18,000 sq.ft. inside the new 297,000 sq. ft. Precision Measurement Laboratory (PML). The building, an extension of the existing Building 1, includes flexible instrument and nanotechnology laboratories, as well as lab support space, offices, and meeting areas. (About $85 million of the $118.6 million project budget came from federal stimulus funding.)
The Quantum Electronics and Photonics Division is known for world-leading electrical standards, record-setting micro-sensors for homeland security, and components for quantum computers. The new cleanroom allows precision manufacturing of custom microfabricated devices for NIST's own research, as well as fabrication of unique devices used by external partners for applications such as precision astronomical research and measurements. Device types include superconducting, magnetic, optoelectronic, and micro-electromechanical.
The improved facility should help NIST maintain its leadership position in multiple specialty areas, such as fabrication of quantum standards that are used by metrology labs worldwide. The division is also well-known for its ability to make transition-edge sensors (TES), in which energy deposited by incoming photons or particles forces a transition from the superconducting to the normal state.
Until recently, as many as half the nanoscale devices produced by the team were unusable, due to issues with air quality and temperature control. The new facility, with its much more stable prototyping environment, should eliminate such problems. Dave Rudman, leader of the Quantum Devices Group, says, "Basically, what has been done is to take a 25-year-old facility that was never built to be a true cleanroom, and bring it into the 21st century. It is clear evidence of how important microfabrication and related efforts are to NIST-Boulder that we have devoted fully one quarter of the space in our new Precision Measurement Laboratory building to this cleanroom resource."
Designed and engineered by HDR Architecture, Alexandria, Va., the PML building is organized with its lab spaces on one side of a circulation spine, or "pedestrian street," and office areas on the other side. Lab areas are divided into two primary blocks: the cleanroom, and non-cleanroom instrument labs.
The cleanroom modules are arranged along both sides of a clean corridor, with access from the "pedestrian street" via a gowning area and airlock vestibule. A wipe-down station allows equipment to be cleaned thoroughly before it is brought into the room. Surrounding the cleanroom is a service corridor for the delivery of supplies, chemicals, and equipment; pass-throughs facilitate handling. A separate observation corridor permits views into and through the space.
Numerous chases within the large cleanroom allow easy access to instruments and tools. Toxic-gas monitoring provides sophisticated levels of detection for 10 different hazardous gases. Among the 60 precision tools now available to the team are a commercial-grade stepper for optical lithography, allowing feature sizes of 0.35 μm; 15 deposition tools and 13 dry-etch tools; a scanning electron microscope suitable for rudimentary e-beam lithography; and a two-chamber unit for molecular beam epitaxy, featuring separate chambers for gallium nitride and gallium arsenide deposition.
The high-tech building also makes ample provisions for staff comfort. The enclosed private offices are situated on an exterior wall for daylighting, with flex office and support space toward the interior, adjacent to the main corridor. Staff lounges, vending areas, and small conference spaces allow the team to interact, share information, and relax. Information kiosks, artwork, and other interior design features punctuate the central "street."
Though these quality-of-life amenities make the building pleasant, it's the highly controlled cleanroom space that represents the greatest benefit to the Quantum Electronics and Photonics Division, and ultimately to their internal and external customers.
Future projects now possible because of enhanced cleanroom capabilities include manufacturing of advanced multi-zone surface-electrode ion traps for quantum information processing and simulations; microfabricated "chip scale" atomic magnetometers for use in neuroscience; super-sensitive atomic force sensors using quantum-limited micromechanical detectors; and integrated microfluidic and microelectronic circuits for biosensors.
Bob Hickernell, head of the division, says, "The expanded ability to go rapidly from invention to realization of microfabricated devices will enable the NIST-Boulder research staff to realize a wide range of breakthroughs in microfabricated quantum standards and measurement systems."
TeraDiode Inc., a manufacturer of ultra-high brightness direct diode lasers for industrial applications, including steel cutting and welding, is building a 25,000 sq. ft. high-technology manufacturing center in Wilmington, Mass.
The company has received a $2 million term loan from MassDevelopment's Emerging Technology Fund. To outfit the building, TeraDiode is creating 15,000 sq. ft. of manufacturing floor space, most of which requires a cleanroom environment and specialty alignment equipment. TeraDiode will use loan proceeds to buy equipment for assembly, testing, laboratory and office uses, laboratory construction, and working capital for assembling lasers.
TeraDiode is developing direct diode laser technology for industrial and military applications. The company’s technology, pioneered at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, has broken records for combined power and beam quality from a direct diode laser. Many experts consider direct diode lasers to be the future of the industrial laser industry.
MassDevelopment, the state's finance and development agency, works with businesses, nonprofits, financial institutions, and communities to stimulate economic growth across the Commonwealth.
Purdue University Calumet's Water Institute and its Energy Efficiency & Reliability Center have upgraded their labs thanks to grants from the government and various organizations.
The 2,000 sq. ft. Water Institute lab is supported by $1.8 million in grants and gifts from the U.S. Department of Energy; National Science Foundation; BP; and the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Engineering. The facility includes a Class 100 cleanroom for conducting experiments sensitive to air contamination; a laser system for measuring the size and speed of water particles; a Scanning Electron Microsopy Machine to enhance membrane process understanding; an inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer machine for metal analysis; a fume hold for removing potentially volatile chemical vapors during experiments; a geothermal unit for heating and cooling air; a membrane system for studying water filtration; and a sensor station/area for studying water contaminants.
"Our new lab and equipment allow us to examine at a more minute level properties of water, contaminants and filtration types," Water Institute Director, Professor and Head of Mechanical Engineering George Nnanna says. "This will enable us, not only to increase knowledge in fields in which we currently are focusing our research—membrane technologies and sensors for detecting contaminants in water—but also to investigate new areas such as emerging contaminants."
Introduced in 2004, Purdue Calumet's Energy Efficiency & Reliability Center conducts research on new energy systems, as well as devices and methods to enable more efficient use of energy. Support for the center's new 1,000+ sq. ft. lab facility came from a $900,000 grant from the Dept. of Energy.
The space is designed to be highly flexible in response to current and future needs, while meeting physical, safety, and security requirements for ongoing and anticipated energy research activities. The lab is equipped to handle chemicals, relevant biological organisms, hydrogen and other gases, energy storage systems, renewable energy, light analysis, and electric power. There also is computational and visualization capability for local data processing and analysis.
Purdue University Calumet is located in Hammond, IN.
The mission of C-CARE is to standardize and support the industrial coating and finishing sectors to improve overall product quality and decrease waste and cost for a wide-spectrum of manufacturers. The goal of C-CARE is to create an industry-recognized national standard and world-class facility for workforce training, education, and research for industrial coating processes and technologies. A unique combination of industrial experts, manufacturing partners, content experts, training providers, educational partners, and technologically advanced facilities, poises C-CARE to grow into a first-in-class training provider that helps manufacturers to increase product quality and reduce inefficiencies that affect quality and cost.
At C-CARE, industry can:
1). Receive work-force training on advanced technologies.
2). Develop process engineering and standard operating procedures.
3). Test and prototype new coating technologies, chemistries, and processes.
4). Develop testing and quality control standards.
5). Perform research and development on new products and processes.
6). Improve processing conditions to improve quality and lower cost
7). Replace solvent-based technologies with environmentally-friendly water-based chemistries.
The lab at C-CARE is a new 12,000 sq. ft. state-of-the art industrial coating facility located in South Boston, Virginia that is equipped to support coating technologies for the aerospace, automotive, marine, construction, wood, manufacturing , and food industries. This custom designed facility provides the most advanced laboratory in North America for process engineering and industrial coating application training and is equipped with the latest application coating technology - including advanced robotics, reciprocating spray equipment, and virtual reality training systems. The facility is operated by AWFI, a company with access to subject matter experts with years of experience within the industrial coatings industry.
The entire facility is climate-controlled for temperature and humidity to meet an encompassing range of manufacturing environment specifications. A key advantage of C-CARE are complete computerized air make up systems to provide full climate control throughout the lab. Climate-controlled functionality provides real world testing scenarios to match your manufacturing sites’ weather conditions. This control over temperature and humidity also allows for testing the application and performance of your coating system over a wide dynamic range to optimize the manufacturing process and provide your customers with optimal product design characteristics.
Advanced features of the C-CARE lab include a fully programmable hang-line with 3-D curing technology, a reciprocating spray flatline with convection IR and UV curing, a 24′ x 10′ x 14” high auto-pressurized cross draft booth, and a powder coat booth. The C-CARE facility supports many different types of spray application technology from multiple component mixing to the most advanced rotary atomizers. Our vast array of application technologies allows for testing and process development all in one location, giving your organization a complete solution for industrial coating application requirements Click here to see a full list of all application technologies supported at C-CARE.
C-CARE is creating a non-profit arm that will be the vehicle by which industry recognized curriculum is created and administered to the broader manufacturing community.
C-CARE’s goals are to:
In addition to the aforementioned resources at C-CARE, a SimSpray virtual spraybooth training simulation system is scheduled to finish installation in early 2012. C-CARE's SimSpray system will enhance technicians' preparedness for the coatings industry, with benefits such as avoiding waste, and also the ability to identify and correct flaws in their own spraying techniques before physically coating a product.
EV Group, a supplier of wafer bonding and lithography equipment for the MEMS, nanotechnology, and semiconductor markets, has completed its expanded cleanroom IV facility at its corporate headquarters in St. Florian, Austria.
As part of the company's long-term growth strategy to address high-volume tool orders and speed time to market for its worldwide customer base, EV Group doubled its cleanroom space for process development and pilot production services. On top of that, the company increased the size of its application labs, added new R&D facilities for internal tool development and testing, and opened a new customer and employee training center.
In tandem with the new cleanroom expansion, EVG increased the number of fully automated high-volume manufacturing systems (for different wafer sizes) to strengthen its customer demonstration and process development capabilities. While manufacturing and product development are centralized at EV Group's corporate headquarters, technology and process development teams in Austria work closely with the company's subsidiaries in Arizona, New York, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, where additional application labs and cleanroom facilities are available for onsite customer demonstration and technology process development.
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