Issue

Regional deliveries of Praxair (www.praxair.com) industrial specialty gases used for semiconductor and laboratory calibration, as well as nitrogen for the food-freezing industry, plus other industrial and medical gases, are returning to normal following explosions and fire that tore through the company’s distribution facility here in late June.

Millipore Corp. (www.millipore.com) has developed a custom-designed loop system linking two of its technologies for ultrapure water requirements in research being conducted by Allen Institute for Brain Science (AIBS; www.brainatlas.org).

Gordon Ely, validation manager at Nelson Laboratories, has been named president-elect of the Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technology (IEST; www.iest.org) for 2005-2006.

News snippets from the world of contamination control.

Putting a new spin on the outsourcing of medical device research and development, equipment design company Foster-Miller (www.foster-miller.com) has unveiled a series of services designed to help medical device makers identify, target, design and manufacture successful and safe new products.

In what president and CEO Edward Grady calls a “strategic combination,” Brooks Automation (www.brooks.com), which provides automation solutions for semiconductor manufacturing, has acquired vacuum-technology leader Helix Technology Corp. (www.helixtechnology.com).

Just a few miles down Route 3 from Brooks Automation, Millipore Corp. (www.millipore.com) has also been busy strengthening its global presence, acquiring a prominent aseptic-processing-tool developer in Sweden and a biotech contract-testing lab in the Netherlands.

A maker of washable computer keyboards is urging healthcare and infectious-disease professionals to investigate the risk of harmful pathogens that take up residence at the workstation and are then transferred to patients.

Freescale Semiconductor Inc. (www.freescale.com) has embarked on a memory technology-magnetic tunnel-junction random access memory, or MRAM-that is proving to have implications for manufacturing in Freescale’s own cleanrooms.

The Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technology (www.iest.org), long active in helping to establish worldwide contamination-control standards for cleanrooms, will now have a voice on a newly created technical committee that will produce standards for emerging nanotechnology applications.

There’s no question that a lot of research money is being invested in the development of new nanotechnology-based devices, medicines, machines and ultimately products.

IEST-STD-CC1246D was published in 2002 and is the latest revision of the standard that was first published in 1962 as MIL-STD-1246.

The cleanroom industry cannot claim to evolve as rapidly and completely as some of its customers; nevertheless, it is ever changing.

Pharmaceutical manufacturers have relied upon laboratory testing to resolve process, product, and quality issues for the last century.

Water is indisputably a critical element of many high-technology manufacturing processes.

With its durability, resistance to corrosion and high quality finish, powder coating has become a preferred finishing choice among both consumers and manufacturers, and good contamination-control techniques can ensure that a powder coating operation is producing the highest quality, defect-free finish possible.

Each month, CleanRooms brings you a collection of the latest product innovations in the contamination-control industry.

Garments play an important role in maintaining the cleanliness of a cleanroom or critical environment. Whether your facility chooses to rent garments or send its own out for laundering, an efficient, certified garment-laundering program is essential for ensuring the integrity of cleanroom wearables.