(Well, we believe we’re the first anyhow….please do get in touch with us if we’re factually inaccurate on this one. No doubt the large aerospace companies have cleanrooms, but we’re reliably informed they’re classified as being located in South Gloucestershire!)

One of the main drivers behind relocating ourselves from SETsquared Bristol to Unit DX was always about getting to this point, having our own cleanroom space to work in at NuNano HQ.

Obviously our wafer fabrication has been (and indeed will continue to be) undertaken in the cleanroom in Edinburgh but our probe inspection and AFM testing has been predominantly run out of the cleanrooms at the University of Bristol. Whilst this has been a great arrangement with the university, it feels brilliant to finally have our own space, downstairs from the office.

The cleanroom build was project managed by John Rudin of Folium Optics using experience from their own cleanroom builds as a small business. Their advice on design, materials and air handling requirements was invaluable. The actual construction of the cleanroom went remarkably smoothly, thanks to the additional help from the team at Unit DX.

For those of you that don’t know, a cleanroom is just that – a clean room, with no dust, no tiny bits of fabric, or indeed anything that can get on or in the tools and materials worked on within it. The air is constantly sucked through filtering systems to ensure it is clean. Air from outside is filtered and blown into the room in such a way that when the door opens it always blows outwards, again to reduce contamination.

Cleanrooms are rated according to the number of particles of a given size in a given volume of air. Air flow and pressure can be adjusted to maintain a certain specification. We were incredibly pleased that from the initial test our space was found to be a higher specification than we had designed it for, which speaks to the overall quality I think of the Unit DX lab spaces.

That isn’t to say that the build was without its fair share of challenges. To begin with the room was effectively a standard box shape – and it had a window in it which was tricky to work around. We had to make decisions about where to position the entrance of the cleanroom, where we would store our equipment, how we would get the airflow to vent to ensure we achieved the required high level of cleanliness, where we’d be asking people to get suited up to go into the space, and so on.

Through regular tests we’ve been able to confirm that the space maintains the appropriate particle count and earlier this month, in addition to the AFM we already have, we took delivery of an SEM too. It was an exciting day in the office and pretty much impossible to keep the team out of the lab as everyone was eager to see the instruments in action.

I’m really proud of what we’ve achieved and we’re already enjoying working in the space. Thanks to everyone who helped with the build.

Check out the timelapse video below if you want to see how we went about building our very own cleanroom….