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Nov. 16, 2004 – There’s good news for nano center builders. New construction in the U.S. and the world at universities and national labs is adding more business to the economy.
Building nano center facilities is not like putting up a Wal-Mart. It’s a tricky job to get done right. Much of the complexity stems from the fact that the new or remodeled labs are often in the middle of existing campuses.
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Installing specialized, delicate equipment also requires careful construction activity planning. Some are so sensitive, that if you talk, the noise affects these devices. Other machines are scaled to the size of microns. That demands precise construction sequencing and timing.
“We’ve been involved in projects ranging from bioengineering to pharmaceutical and medical device labs, to solid-state electronic labs,” all of which are more closely related to industry than to government spending, said Andy Vazzano, senior vice president with Detroit-based SmithGroup Inc.
SmithGroup Inc. is an architectural, engineering planning and interior design firm with 800 employees in nine U.S. offices.
The company, which celebrated its 150th anniversary recently, is planning a solid-state electronic lab expansion at University of Michigan Engineering School, just finished a clean room for University of Maryland Bioresearch lab, and is developing two labs for a consortium of UC Berkeley and the Lawrence Livermore National Labs.
The company started construction on the 96,000-square-foot Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Molecular Foundry project in January this year and expects to finish in 2006.
As for economic growth in general, Vazzano thinks government-funded research spending has evened out, except for the biomedical side. Industry spending continues to grow about 4 per cent per year, much slower than the rate of growth they saw toward the late 1970s to early 1980s.
At HDR Architecture, Inc., based in Nebraska, Mark Jamison, director of advanced technology, including nanotech and semiconductors, says his company is seeing growth from national labs and universities as well as the improving economy.
National Nanotechnology Initiative funding supported HDR building projects at Sandia in New Mexico and Brookhaven, in Long Island, but the new Twenty-first Century Nanotechnology Development bill will put spending on a firmer basis with its multi-year focus, said Jamison.
Universities always have to-do lists of building projects, but nanotechnology and nanoscience projects are rising to the top, he says. University and national lab spending spreads to industry, especially the semiconductor industry, which has been on an up cycle.
In spite of good news about more building, there doesn’t see much effect on overall employment. “There must be some, but it’s hard to gauge. The same skill sets are used in other areas,” said Mike Lenzen, director of corporate communications with McCarthy Building Companies Inc. of St. Louis, Mo.
As nanotech spending ramps up, it is instructive to look at earlier lab building booms. Those booms began with major universities in biomedical projects, funded by the triumvirate of university support: government, business and philanthropy. Spending then spread to industry.
Stuttgart-based M+W Zander, another facility designer and builder, has several U.S. projects, including a Center for Nanoscale Materials at Argonne National Lab, a Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences at Oak Ridge National Lab, and the Albany NanoTech Center for the State University of New York in Albany.
Subcontractors, too, are enjoying an up tick. New orders for Munich-based SUSS MicroTec, which supplies packaging lithography and test equipment for the microelectronics and nano device markets, are an example of improvement in the world economy.
In July, SUSS received orders for lithography systems and coat/bake/develop tracks from Taiwan-based Advanced Semiconductor Engineering, a semiconductor packaging and testing company.
Huntair, in Portland, Ore., has been making super clean rooms needed to manufacture electronic components for decades.
Dave Benson, Huntair president, said his business has seen “a steady increase” at research institutions across the country. Spending increases for clean rooms are not huge until the wave hits production level facilities.
“We have a substantial amount of semiconductor work, both locally and internationally, but not as much as earlier,” Benson said.
Clean Rooms International, Inc. in Michigan, deals with a wide variety of industries through a distributor network. They make entire clean rooms, work stations and various components of the rooms.
Nelson Werkema, president of Clean Rooms, has seen growth in both public and private sectors, but the rate is radically different for each in his experience.
“The proportion of university-type business has increased about 50 percent over four years ago, while the rest of the economy has gone up about 12 percent in same period,” he said.