Lurie Nanofabrication Facility

The mission of the LNF is to provide effective, efficient, safe, and socially responsible access to advanced nanofabrication equipment and expertise thereby promoting, enabling, and encouraging cutting-edge education, research and business development from materials and individual process steps to entire systems.

The Lurie Nanofabrication Facility (LNF) is available, on a fee basis, for use by research groups from government, industry and universities. Equipment and processes are available for research on silicon integrated circuits, MEMS, III-V compound devices, organic devices and nanoimprint technology. We also encourage researchers from non-traditional disciplines to make use of our processes, such as metal and dielectric coatings, vacuum processes, fabrication of micro and nano components and metrology tools.

The LNF is located within the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Building. The facility first opened in September 1986 and was fully operational by 1988. It was renamed the Michigan Nanofabrication Facility in January 2005 and was dedicated as the Lurie Nanofabrication Facility in April 2008 thanks to a generous donation by the Lurie Foundation and other donors.

Initially the lab consisted of a class 1,000/100/10 research laboratory with approximately 9,000 sq. ft. (6,500 sq. ft. under filter) of cleanroom and a separate 1,000 sq. ft. class 10,000 instructional laboratory that supported the EECS instructional courses. The research laboratory consisted of five process bays (silicon lithography/diffusion, silicon LPCVD, compound semiconductor devices, thin-film deposition, and dry etching) plus five separate, connected rooms for e-beam lithography and metrology (Class 10) and for compound semiconductor materials growth.

In 2008 the lab was expanded to 18,000 sq. ft. (11,000 sq. ft. under filter) of class 1,000/100/10 cleanroom space and is equipped with over 120 major state-of-the-art tools for 43 and 63 processing. In addition the LNF has a additional 2,500 sq. ft. of a HEPA-filtered single pass clean space that is used for wet chemistry, processing with organics or biological samples, and mechanical finishing. The primary cleanroom supports processing with silicon, compound semiconductors, and organic materials, for the fabrication of devices and microsystems (MEMS) with feature sizes down to 10 nanometers.

The facility is supported by a highly trained group of engineers and technicians whose primary responsibility is to ensure that the equipment is well maintained and characterized. In addition, the LNF has domain experts whose primary responsibility is to provide comprehensive support to users and their projects. The LNF also employs a full time staff engineer for support of undergraduate courses that use the facility.

The facility, comparable to the best in the world, is used by hundreds of students and researchers at the University of Michigan, other academic institutions, national labs and industry.