September 9, 2011 — The Entrepreneurship Innovation Center at Lorain County Community College (LCCC) hosted a groundbreaking ceremony today for its Richard Desich SMART Commercialization Center for Microsystems, which Mark Kvamme, Chief Investment Officer and President of JobsOhio, which is Ohio’s private, non-profit corporation designed to stimulate economic growth, has affectionately dubbed "MEMSville."
The SMART Commercialization Center is named in honor of Desich, a Lorain native and member of Lorain County Community College District Board of Trustees for 34 years, serial entrepreneur, renowned national speaker, and philanthropist and community leader.
The new SMART Center will be a three-story, 46,000-square-foot facility that will include class 100, class 1,000 and class 10,000 clean rooms, general lab space and customer incubation areas. It will be connected to LCCC’s Entrepreneurship Innovation Center. The microsystems center aims to help industry partners bring micro electro mechanical systems (MEMS), sensors, microsystems, and other designs to commercial ramp-up. This includes the critical stages of packaging, reliability testing and inspection of microsystems and sensors. Lorain County Community College announced a $5.5 million grant in 2010 from the Wright Center for Sensor Systems Engineering administered by Cleveland State University to grow new jobs, businesses, and educational programs in sensor technologies. Initial beneficiaries of the grant include Acense LLC (Twinsburg); R.W. Beckett Corporation (North Ridgeville); GreenField Solar (Oberlin/North Ridgeville); and Case Western Reserve University (Cleveland), all of Ohio. The equipment and expertise funded by this award will be made accessible to the entire community.
Fifteen companies have already expressed their plans in writing to utilize the SMART Center. These include the WCSSE partners of Asence, Greenfield Solar, R.W. Beckett Corporation, Case Western Reserve University, along with current and future users ABS Materials, CoreTech Consulting, Crane Aerospace, Emerson Thermodisc, Emerson Ridge Tool, GrafTech, Nordson, NexTech Materials, Scientific Monitoring, Spectre Sensor, Traycer Diagnostic Systems.
Additionally, 13 highly visible organizations in the microsystems space have documented their plans to recommend the SMART Center as a prime resource for product commercialization. These include, ASM International, the Electronic Device Failure Analysis Society, Libra Industries, Midwest Micro Devices, The Ohio State Nanotech West Lab, the University of Michigan Lurie NanoFacility, the Notre Dame Nanofabrication facility, Purdue University’s Birck Nanotechnology Center, Nortech FlexMatters, the Ohio Fuel Cell Coalition, the Surface Mount Technology Association and Valtronic.
The SMART Center is scheduled to open in spring of 2013. While the Center is under construction, partners can develop ideas at Lorain County Community College’s Entrepreneurship Innovation Center, which boasts an 1,800 square-foot, class 10,000 clean room, with a complete set of microsystems packaging, inspection and test equipment along with another 1,800 square feet of software labs, customer space and administrative space.
Learn more at http://www.smartmicrosystems.com/