CNF plans for 2003 'complicated' move into Duffield Hall

By David Brand

Details of how researchers in the Cornell Nanofabrication Facility (CNF) plan the delicate, complex move into Duffield Hall, well before the new high-tech building on the engineering quad is completed, were made public last week by Sandip Tiwari, director of CNF.

Alyssandrea Hamad, left, a Cornell graduate student in materials science and engineering, describes her research project to Lawrence S. Goldberg, senior engineering adviser with the National Science Foundation, during the poster session for the Cornell Nanofabrication Facility's annual meeting, Sept. 23, in Clark Hall. Charles Harrington/University Photography

"Our aim is not to have any capability down for any significant amount of time," he said.

Speaking at the national-user facility's annual meeting at the Statler Hotel Sept. 23, Tiwari said that Duffield's progress is on track for CNF to begin installing its new equipment -- including an E-beam machine and hot-processing stacks for growth and deposition -- in the building's first-floor clean room during May through August 2003.

Existing CNF equipment, from other lithography and plasma processing tools to vacuum systems and characterization tools, will then be moved between September and November of next year. After Nov. 30, 2003, CNF's present location at Knight Lab will be demolished to make way for Duffield's huge atrium connecting Phillips and Upson halls.

Duffield, a $58.5 million nanotechnology research and teaching facility, is due for completion in the summer of 2004. Construction began in June 2001 and building is now on schedule for completion of phase 1 by August 2003, which will allow the transfer of CNF to its new quarters.

The new home of CNF will be a 17,000-square-foot clean room, taking up the entire first floor of Duffield, almost doubling the square footage at Knight Lab. The new clean room will include space for CNF research such as thin film and chemical processing (10,000 square feet), Nanobiotechnology Center research (1,000 square feet) and an instructional lab for undergraduate education (1,000 square feet). There also will be a togging room, where clean-room suits are put on or discarded.

The move from Knight to Duffield, said Tiwari, "will be a very complicated project and a lot of different elements have to work well together."

Although the goal is almost no interruption in service for users, a few of the lab's capabilities will be unavailable at any given time, said Tiwari. Indeed, for a while, most capabilities will be available in either or both simultaneously functioning locations, he said The worst case is that very specialized tools, such as the Leica VB6, one of the most advanced electron beam lithography tools in the world, will be out of commission for a month or longer.

The design of the new CNF clean room will allow the lab "to accomplish what we want over the next 10 to 15 years," said Tiwari. The facilities will be "much, much cleaner" and allow full electronic access control. There will be huge upgrades in areas such as de-ionized water and nitrogen supply, an intelligent toxic gas detector system, backside chemical storage and underground transport of equipment and chemicals through dedicated corridors.

Despite the impending move, CNF continues to experience a 15 to 20 percent annual expansion in users, said Tiwari. A dominant fraction of users is academic, and this usage continues to grow, from large research universities to Cornell undergraduates.

Indeed, he said, CNF has had to acquire an additional 700 square feet of wet chemistry research space in Langmuir Lab in Cornell Business and Technology Park, which will be used until the move into Duffield Hall.

The featured speaker at the CNF event was Venkat Narayanamurti, dean of engineering and applied sciences at Harvard University. His talk was followed by reports from facility users on cutting-edge research, from single-molecule electronic devices to carbon nanotube transistors.