OTHER ELECTRONICS & NANOTECHNOLOGY
INDUSTRY UPDATE
September 2015
McIlvaine Company
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
Digicom
Electronics Expands its Headquarters
Arizona
State Will Lead National Nanotech Site
Swiss
Plasma Center to Harness the Sun's Energy
SUSS
MicroTec Announces New Competence-Center for Nanoimprint
Digicom Electronics Inc., an electronics manufacturing
services company, has expanded its facility in Oakland, Calif., in the San
Francisco Bay area. In addition to doubling in size, Digicom added more advanced
manufacturing equipment and additional personnel to increase manufacturing
capacity and capabilities, company officials reported.
Digicom specializes in complex electronic boards and
assemblies for medical device, military, aerospace, and industrial products. “We
moved into this new facility just three years ago, but business has grown and we
wanted to increase our capabilities and capacity, so we took over the entire
building,” said Mo Ohady, general manager, Digicom Electronics. “We are excited
about the quality and services we can offer and invite everyone to visit, bring
their designs or prototypes, and see for themselves.”
The facility has a wall-to-wall electrostatic discharge
flooring, specialized cleaning equipment and process controls, and an emphasis
on green manufacturing, according to the company. Advanced component placement,
selective soldering, reflow ovens, and automated inspection and test equipment
were added to the company’s operation. All Digicom Electronics’ prototyping,
purchasing, supply chain management, assembly, manufacturing, and shipping also
is housed in the expanded building. Digicom has ISO 9001:2008, ISO 13485:2003
medical devices quality, quality system regulation 21 CFR 820.
ASU NanoFab is a flexible nano-processing facility that offers
state-of-the-art device processing and characterization tools for university
research and for external company prototype development. Begun in 1981, this
facility, serving the Southwest, was one of 10 nanofabs affiliated with the
National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure Initiative, the predecessor
to the National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure program. It will now
be part of the new Nanotechnology Collaborative Infrastructure Southwest. Image:
Jessica Hochreiter/ASUArizona State University has been chosen to lead a new
National Science Foundation site that will provide a Southwest regional
infrastructure to advance nanoscale science, engineering, and technology
research.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) will provide a total of
$81 million over five years to support 16 user facility sites as part of a new
National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI). ASU’s site is funded
at $800,000 per year for five years.
The ASU site, like the other hubs, will help researchers from
universities, corporations, and government to develop electrical, mechanical and
biological systems whose components are smaller than the diameter of a human
hair. This nanotechnology may be able to create new materials and devices with a
vast range of applications: electronics, biomaterials energy production, or
consumer goods.
The NNCI sites will provide researchers access to university
facilities with leading-edge fabrication and characterization tools,
instrumentation, and expertise within all disciplines of nanoscale science,
engineering and technology.
Nanotechnology systems are built at the molecular level of
less than 100 nanometers. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. To put that
scale in perspective, the diameter of a human hair is in the range 50,000 to
75,000 nanometers.
The NNCI award has been granted to Trevor Thornton, professor
in the School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering, one of the six Ira
A. Fulton Schools of Engineering. He will be the principal investigator and
director of the new Nanotechnology Collaborative Infrastructure Southwest
(NCI-SW).
The goals of the NCI-SW site are to build a Southwest regional
infrastructure for nanotechnology discovery and innovation, to address societal
needs through education and entrepreneurship and to serve as a model site of the
NNCI.
Key partners include the Maricopa County Community College
District and Science Foundation Arizona.
Co-principal investigators from ASU include Stuart Bowden,
associate research professor in the School of Electrical, Computer and Energy
Engineering; Jenefer Husman, associate professor in the Sanford School; and
Jameson Wetmore, associate professor in the School for the Future of Innovation
in Society, Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes, and School of Human
Evolution & Social Change.
The NNCI framework builds on the National Nanotechnology
Infrastructure Network (NNIN), which enabled major discoveries, innovations and
contributions to education and commerce for more than 10 years.
“NSF’s long-standing investments in nanotechnology
infrastructure have helped the research community to make great progress by
making research facilities available,” says Pramod Khargonekar, the NSF’s
assistant director for engineering. “NNCI will serve as a nationwide backbone
for nanoscale research, which will lead to continuing innovations and economic
and societal benefits.”
According to Thornton, ASU has a well-established
nanotechnology infrastructure, with faculty strengths that transcend
disciplines.
“This gave us a competitive advantage in being chosen for this
award,” he says. “We also successfully directed the NSF predecessor to the NNCI
centers, a NNIN site — ASU NanoFab — that wrapped up 6 years of funding at the
end of August. The NNCI allows us to expand our offerings and outreach in a big
way.”
The NCI-SW site will encompass six collaborative research
facilities: the ASU NanoFab, the LeRoy Eyring Center for Solid State Science,
the Flexible Electronics and Display Center, the Peptide Array Core Facility,
the Solar Power Laboratory, and the User Facility for the Social and Ethical
Implications of Nanotechnology.
The NCI-SW site will open the Flexible Electronics and Display
Center and the Solar Power Laboratory to the broader research community for the
first time.
The site will provide particular intellectual and
infrastructural strengths in the life sciences, flexible electronics, renewable
energy, and the societal impact of nanotechnology.
Wetmore will be leading the Social and Ethical Implications
component of ASU's NNCI effort.
The Social and Ethical Implications component is made up of
two parts: 1) building a social science "user facility" where scholars can come
to ASU to learn to use tools to help them collaborate across disciplines and
develop a better understanding of the past, present and future social
implications of science and technology; and 2) offering programs that train
scientists and engineers in how to identify and think about the social aspects
and implications of their work.
"The NNCI effort at ASU is exciting because it is a blending
of scientists, engineers and social scientists working together not just in
name, but in practice,” Wetmore says. "Those involved have a long history of
working together and look forward to continuing to develop an engineering
workforce that can see the big picture and better work towards social goods."
“What also is outstanding about this program is that it not
only focuses on building a nanotech industry, it is equally concerned with
creating an educated workforce. Our efforts will span from K-12 all the way to
working professionals,” Thornton says.
ASU will collaborate with the Maricopa County Community
College District and Science Foundation Arizona to develop STEM (science,
technology, engineering, and mathematics) materials with a nanotechnology focus
for Associate of Science and Associate of Applied Science students in
communities throughout metropolitan Phoenix and rural Arizona.
ASU also will provide entrepreneurship training for users who
wish to commercialize nanotechnology in order to benefit society. To facilitate
the commercialization of research breakthroughs, the NCI-SW will support
prototyping facilities and low-volume manufacturing pilot lines for solar cells,
flexible electronics and biomolecular arrays.
The Science Outside the Lab summer program at the ASU
Washington, D.C., campus will allow users across the NNCI to explore the policy
issues associated with nanotechnology.
A web portal hosted and maintained by the Maricopa County
Community College District will provide seamless access to all the resources of
the NCI-SW.
Through a FY 2016 competition, one of the newly awarded sites
will be chosen to coordinate the facilities.
This coordinating office will enhance the sites’ impact as a
national nanotechnology infrastructure and establish a web portal to link the
individual facilities’ websites to provide a unified entry point to the user
community of overall capabilities, tools and instrumentation. The office also
will help to coordinate and disseminate best practices for national-level
education and outreach programs.
Funding for the NNCI program is provided by all NSF
directorates and the Office of International Science and Engineering.
The 16 sites are in 15 states and involve 27 universities,
including Stanford, Harvard, Cornell, the University of Texas-Austin, the
University of Pennsylvania, North Carolina State University, and Georgia
Institute of Technology.
The Center for Research in Plasma Physics (CRPP) has become
the Swiss Plasma Center (SPC), and for good reason: the Center is upgrading its
facilities and expanding its scope of activities. These improvements strengthen
the role the Lausanne-based tokamak will play as one of three research
facilities selected by the EUROfusion consortium to develop nuclear fusion as
part of the international project known as ITER.
Once mastered, nuclear fusion will be able to produce enough
energy – clean, reliable energy – to meet the needs of mankind for centuries to
come. Unlike fission, fusion does not create radioactive waste with a long
lifespan, and it is based on abundant materials that are easier to extract than
uranium.
Numerous international research projects are under way, and
one of the most crucial challenges they face is plasma confinement. This refers
to confining a gas that is heated to more than a hundred million degrees –
considerably hotter than the core of the sun – so that the component hydrogen
atoms will fuse and release huge amounts of energy. But these extreme
temperatures must not damage the reactor, which means the plasma must be kept
away from the walls. This is done using a magnetic field that is contained
inside a ring-shaped chamber called a tokamak.
The Variable Configuration Tokamak, which was built in 1992 at
the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL, Switzerland), has
always been on the leading edge among research facilities in this field. The TCV
tokamak, as it is known, is operated by the Center for Research in Plasma
Physics (CRPP) and is unique because – as its name indicates – it can produce
plasma in various shapes. This feature allows scientists to determine the most
appropriate configuration for use in an energy-producing reactor. And it was
thanks to this feature that in late 2013 the TCV tokamak was selected by the
EUROfusion consortium as one of three national facilities on the European
continent to be used to help design the international power plant ITER,
currently being built in the south of France, and develop its successor, DEMO, a
prototype commercial reactor.
The Lausanne-based lab recently received 10 million francs
from the Swiss government to upgrade certain aspects of its facility. Thanks to
these funds, the Center will soon be equipped to carry out new experiments on
the TCV tokamak, particularly in relation to extracting energy and particles
from the plasma. New mechanisms for heating the plasma with microwaves and with
the injection of neutral particles may also be installed. At the same time, the
Center is expanding its sector for lower density and lower temperature plasmas
in order to explore new applications for plasma, such as in the medical field,
the food industry and astrophysics. These improvements will encourage many Swiss
and European researchers to visit Lausanne and conduct new experiments.
Alongside these developments, the Lausanne-based lab is
changing its name. It is now the Swiss Plasma Center that will impress its
credentials on Switzerland, Europe and the rest of the world as a leading
institution in this field. The renamed Center was officially inaugurated today
in Lausanne. Attendees included Bernard Bigot, Director-General of ITER, along
with officials from the EUROfusion consortium, who emphasized the importance of
the research being carried out in Switzerland in support of the objective of the
reactor being built in Cadarache. The reactor, using nuclear fusion, aims to
generate ten times more power than was injected into it.
SUSS MicroTec, a global supplier of equipment and process
solutions for the semiconductor industry and related markets, and the Singh
Center for Nanotechnology at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) are
announcing a cooperation agreement in the field of nanoimprint technologies. As
part of this cooperation, Penn has recently received the equipment set and the
technology know-how for Substrate Conformal Imprint Lithography (SCIL), that
will expand the capabilities of the recently installed MA/BA6 Gen3 Mask Aligner
from SUSS MicroTec at Penn.
Substrate Conformal Imprint Lithography (SCIL) is a
nanoimprint technique combining the advantages of both soft and rigid stamps,
allowing large-area patterning and sub-50nm resolution to be achieved at the
same time. SCIL is applied in diverse fields, ranging from HB LEDs,
Photovoltaics, MEMS, NEMS and mass production of optical gratings for gas
sensing and telecommunications.
The Singh Center for Nanotechnology will implement SCIL for
use in plasmonic devices, semiconductor nanowires, flexible nanocrystal
electronics, biodegradable sensors and MEMS batteries.
In addition, Lithography Manager Dr. Gerald Lopez will lead the Center’s
efforts in qualifying new nanoimprint materials and related process technology
development in close cooperation with SUSS MicroTec.
As a further important part of the cooperation, SUSS
MicroTec`s customers will gain direct access to the cleanroom facilities and the
equipment set installed at Penn, serving as a demonstration center for North
American customers. The experience and high technology level of Penn allows the
customer to see the entire process flow, the imprinting process itself and the
subsequent steps up to a finished device.
“We are pleased to collaborate with SUSS MicroTec for
developing applications with SCIL. By combining our strengths in micro- and
nanofabrication, we are able to provide superior nanoimprint capabilities to our
researchers,” stated Professor Mark Allen, Scientific Director of the Singh
Center for Nanotechnology and Alfred Fitler Moore, Professor of Electrical and
Systems Engineering. “This industrial partnership enhances our ability to
demonstrate how nanoimprint technology serves as a catalyst in research and its
translation into the commercial sector.”
“We are very happy about the cooperation with the Singh Center
for Nanotechnology. Their work will contribute strongly to further commercialize
this large area nano-patterning technique in order to accelerate the adoption
for volume production. In addition, our customers do not just benefit from the
possibility to use Penn’s facilities and get insights to the entire imprinting
process, but also from Penn´s knowledge, by having an experienced partner at
hand”, says Ralph Zoberbier, General Manager Exposure and Laser Processing of
SUSS MicroTec.“
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