Week of April 11
MicroAire Surgical Instruments Announces $8M Expansion
A manufacturer and distributor of highly specialized medical instruments, MicroAire announced it would expand its Albemarle, Va., headquarters with an $8 million dollar expansion. The expansion will double the company’s cleanroom space, where its most recent product, Endotine (an alternative to sutures for facial surgery) is produced.
Read more here.
Watch Live Cleanroom Feed of Mars Rover ‘Curiosity’ Building and Testing Process
A ‘small army of technicians’ have been working non-stop in a California cleanroom in order to prepare a rover for its November launch to Mars.
The technicians are testing the spacecrafts systems, which must be done in a cleanroom to ensure that “contamination from Earth doesn’t accidentally hitch a ride to Mars.” And thanks to the Curiosity Cam installed last October, fans can watch. Click here to visit the NASA site’s Curiosity Cam page.
The craft, named Curiostiy, is about the size of an SUV, and has already undergone a scrutiny of tests to ensure it can perform in Mars’s harsh conditions. Curious fans of Curiosity can also follow the craft’s progress via its Twitter feed.
Read more here.
Former 100,000-sq.-ft. Cleanroom Finds New Life as Data Center Facility
The Qimonda semiconductor plant filed for bankruptcy in 2009, after producing more than a billion chips and electronic PC components. Now, the space is being used Quality Technology Services to house one of the world’s largest data-center facilities.
QTS bought the entire facility – 210-acres of property – for $12 million, and will put another $100 million into the space. The new owner thinks he will fill the massive space easily and quickly, as demand for data-center services is ever-growing.
Read more here.
Renesas Hopes to Get Japanese Plants Back Online, A Crucial Move for Automakers
The Wall Street Journal reports that Renesas Electronics Corp. hopes to get two of its major Japan plants “back online” by mid-April. Last year, the company provided $3 billion-worth of chips used for several automotive applications world-wide.
Read more here.
Pay-Per-use Cleanroom in So. Europe Helps Area Companies Afford Product Development
The Southern European country of Malta received its first pay-per-use cleanroom, where local companies can carry out controlled environment tasks such as repackaging and product development without having to outsource to third parties.
The facility is offered by Inspectra, a product inspection services provider. They decided to invest in the project after doing market research and trends.
Read more here.
Week of April 4
University of Waterloo Nanotech Students Create Smallest Image of Stephen Colbert in the World
Two University of Waterloo undergraduate students of the school’s Nanotechnology Engineering program have used a cleanroom to fabricate the smallest images ever made of Stephen Colbert, the comedian and political satirist TV show host.
The students made four images total, the smallest measuring 110μm by 130μm, the largest measuring 1.8mm by 2.3mm, and were all fabricated on a silicon wafer.
Read more here or visit the students’ blog site www.microcolbert.com, which contains full details on how the images were fabricated.
GE to Once Again Expand Wuxi Water Technologies Plant in China
Aggressively investing in China’s push for cleaner energy and water infrastructure, GE plans to expand its WUXI facility, a state-of-the-art manufacturing plant that houses a Class 1,000 cleanroom. Products created at the facility now include: RO and nanofiltration (NF) membrane elements, PROPAK, RePAK, SeaPRO-E, SeaTECH, PRO AP Series and Brackish Water RO (BWRO) containers, ultrapure water modular plants, BEV APAC RO systems designed for the Asia beverage market, Electrodialysis Reversal (EDR), E-Cell Electrodeionization (EDI) and ZeeWeed UF/membrane bioreactor (MBR).
Read more here
Citing Trends and the Need for Bigger Cleanroom, PharmaCare Moves to Wichita
Pharmacare, a home medical infusion company, will be moving its facility to Northeast Wichita. The company president states that the business needs a larger cleanroom (used to mix medications that are administered to patients), and because “that is the general trend of where most medical offices are going.”
Read more here
GigaCyte to Open New Class 10,000 Media Production Library
GigaCyte, a provider of stem cell-based products and pre-clinical contract research services, has completed construction and received certification for their new Class 10,000 cleanroom facility. The cleanroom will be used for mass cell culture media production.
Read more here
Planned Texas Instruments Purchase of National Seminconductor Corp. a ‘Much-Needed Consolidation’
Analysts are calling the planned purchase of National Semiconductor Corp. by Texas Instruments a “much needed consolidation in the highly fragmented analog sector and underscores the need for scale, an evolving theme in analog semiconductor industry.”
Analysts also believe the move will lead to more analog companies to consider such consolidations. In a statement, Texas Instruments said merging of the industry’s oldest firms will create a dominant force in analog microchips to be used in everything from phones to cars.
Read more here
Charges Filed Against Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories Due to Lapses in Safety That Led to Worker Deaths
The Directorate of Factories has filed a case on Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories due to an incident in December 2010 that led to the death of workers. The plant, which produces active pharmaceutical ingredients, was charged with negligence, issues of safety and standards of equipment, stated the Directorate.
According to a statement from Dr. Reddy’s, the incident took place in the facility’s cleanroom, where the workers were handling the process of micronisation of Omeprazole powder.
The plant is located in Bollarum in India. The details of the incident are still unclear, other than a fire was the cause of death for the two workers. The company has three months to answer to the charges in regards to their safety standards.
Read more here
Week of March 28
Intel Announces New $5B Fab; Concentrates on 22nm Technology
Intel’s Fab 42 is a $5 billion chip-manufacturing plant set to open in 2013. It will be the most advanced high-volume semiconductor mfg facility in the world. Intel’s efforts to grow in the ever-expanding tablet and smartphone markets have caught the attention of the president who toured the company’s Hillsboro, Ore., facility.
Intel says its investment in technology not yet developed and in products not yet designed is a gamble. It’s moving into 22-nanometer technology, which would, if successful, allow Intel to “put about 10 million transistors in a space the size of the period at the end of this sentence.” They expect the demand for this technology to be great.
Read more here.
Texas Instruments Announces Japanese Cleanroom Has Been Recertified
This week, Texas Instruments updated its development on getting its two factories back online after the earthquake. One plant, located in Miho, now has its water, gas and chemical support fixed, and its cleanroom has been recertified, making the facility about 90 percent ready to start production, which they say is scheduled to start again in April (with plans to be back to full production in July).
The Aizu location, which is 150 miles north of Tokyo, has already begun producing chips again, and should back to normal production cycles by mid-April.
Read more here
Canandaigua, N.Y., Fab to Expand, Create Jobs
The Smart System Technology and Commercialization Center’s Canandaigua facility, which is now part of the University at Albany’s College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CSNE), will get $5 million in taxpayer dollars to grow and expand its space. Much of that money will go toward improvements to its cleanroom, and to develop prototyping capabilities. The funds allow the company to retain 40 employees and create 20 more full-time positions.
New Tablet Designed Just for Cleanroom Workers
Xplore Technologies, a manufacturer of tablet PCs, will launch its latest tablet in May, which the company says will feature “ground-breaking designs addressing the specific needs of mobile workers, the military and clean room technicians.”
The company did not offer further details on this technology.
Read more here
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Week of March 14
Oregon’s Computer and Electronic Product Manufacturing Industry Growth Adds Much Needed Jobs to the Area
Oregon added nearly 10,000 jobs in February, its largest gain in nearly 15 years, and 600 of those jobs were in the computer and electronic product manufacturing industry. In total, the sector has seen jobs boosted by 1,200 in the last year. A recent article cites the growth of TriQuint Semiconductor, headquartered in Hillboro, Ore., a manufacturer of chips used in devices such as iPads and iPhones, as well as Intel’s expansion.
Read the full article here.
Japanese Semiconductor Industry Struggles to Get Production Back Online
Japan’s massive earthquake March 11 continues to affect area manufacturers, as they deal with power outages and damage from the quake and tsunami. Some fabs are unable to even assess the damage to their cleanrooms due to the electricity failures throughout the areas. These black outs are expected to continue to prolong the manufacturers’ ability to startup production.
Texas Instruments’ Miho fab, for example, estimates it won’t be able to get back to full production until July. The fab is responsible for 10 percent of the company’s output.
Read more here.
Class 100 Cleanroom Preserves NASA’s SAGE III-ISS, Set to Measure Ozone Recovery in 2014
NASA’s SAGE III-ISS (Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment) will be pulled out of preservation and launched in 2014 to measure ozone damage, aerosols and water vapor in the Earth’s ozone. The satellite is currently in a class 100 cleanroom, where it has been for the past nine years. The room is continually purged with nitrogen to prevent corrosion.
The aircraft will be crucial in discovering if there has been any change since the ban of CFLs.
Read more here.
200-Year-Old Boston-Area Building Offers Cleanroom and Office Space to High-Tech Start Ups
Innovation Place is the name of the industrial facility one couple is outfitting specifically to attract high-tech business to the Melrose area of Massachussettes.
Among the available office and lab space, are two cleanrooms: a 2,500 square-foot cleanroom lies in the basement of the 19th-century building, while a smaller, 1,000 sqaure-foot cleanroom is located on the second floor.
The couple who purchased and outfitted Innovation Place hope to attract start-up high-tech companies especially – ones that cannot afford rental rates on nearby Cambridge facilities. The building already provides space to three technology companies, including one that designs medical devices.
Read more here.
NASA Cleanroom Used to ‘Shake Up’ Telescope Before Launch
The James Webb Space Telescope is the “first next-generation large space observatory,” and an important project of NASA that will serve astronomers worldwide. But before it can get to its destination 14 billion light years away, it will endure significant shaking to determine what it can sustain without damage during launch. NASA engineers intentionally shake and spin the structure, then test it to check for damage. This is all done in a cleanroom located at NASA Goddard in Greenbelt, M.D.
Read more here.
Class 10 Cleanroom in Africa?
Morrocco-based Nemotek Technologie has partnered with Xipeq to address the need for advanced camera solutions in applications including medical devices and mobile phones. Nemotek, which manufactures wafer level cameras and optics, certified Africa’s first Class 10 cleanroom in 2009. The company remains the area’s only optics-based business.
Read more here.
