The Core Facility is designed to foster a publicly accessible cross-disciplinary research environment capable of serving the country's entire nanoscience community, including government, university, and private industry organizations.

"CINT will operate under the premise that in order to realize the full benefit of nanotechnology, we must achieve practical functionality through high-level integration," says Neal Shinn, Ph.D., manager of Sandia's Surface and Interface Science Department, and technical coordinator for the CINT Core Facility.

CINT is one of five Department of Energy (DOE) nanoscale science research centers that, together, form an integrated national infrastructure. Each of the five national centers is a user-focused facility co-located with other major user facilities at DOE laboratories in order to leverage pre-existing research equipment. When complete, CINT will be one of the cornerstones of this program.

"The boundary between traditional scientific disciplines fades at the nanometer scale. We must create flexible environments where scientists from various disciplines can come together to work on complex problems," says Shinn.

Nanotech by Design

The CINT community will be centered around the 96,000-sf Core Facility, designed and engineered by Omaha, Neb.-based HDR, located adjacent to a publicly accessible technology park just outside of Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque.

The Core Facility will consist of three wings—a cleanroom wing, a physical/chemical/biological synthesis wing, and a characterization wing—and feature flexible lab design, social interaction areas, expandable conference rooms, office space, and high-speed data capabilities. Staff from SNL and LANL, as well as visiting students and scientists, will occupy the Core Facility.

The cleanroom wing will house 10,000 sf of Class 1,000 space, with mini-environments up to class 100 available for lithographic patterning and deposition. The cleanroom is designed to be an "integration lab" where top-down and bottom-up approaches can be combined to test new integration concepts. For this reason, not all of the equipment that would normally be found in a traditional microelectronics fabrication lab will be installed at the Core Facility.

The Core's middle wing will house physical, chemical, and biological synthesis labs, while the third wing is engineered for low-vibration and will contain the ultra-quiet labs with highly sensitive equipment including state-of-the-art scanning probe microscopes.

Other equipment to be housed at the CINT Core Facility includes a transmission electron microscope, electron beam lithography, molecular beam epitaxy, mask aligner, reactive ion etcher, plasma enhanced CVD, evaporators, ellipsometers, nano-indenter, pulsed laser deposition, and ultra-fast lasers.

"Part of our model is that if you need the ultra-sophisticated tool or specialized instrument, you'll go to one of the gateway facilities or associated capabilities at Los Alamos or Sandia," says Shinn.

HDR is applying for LEED™ certification of the Core Facility. Among the structure's many green features are an integrated water efficient landscape management plan; plumbing fixtures that reduce CINT's potable water use by 35 percent; environmentally preferable construction materials, including 47 percent recycled and more than 20 percent locally manufactured materials; adhesives, sealants, and paints with low emissions of volatile compounds; and environmentally preferable carpet. A comprehensive commissioning of the building will also be conducted to ensure that complex systems are performing as designed prior to occupancy.

Gateways to the Future

The success of CINT depends on combining the capabilities of the two national laboratories. In order to achieve this, physical gateways will be established at both SNL and LANL campuses, situated 105 miles apart in New Mexico. Equipment will be leveraged at the two institutions with redundancies being minimized and collaboration encouraged.

The CINT Gateway to Sandia is located in the 140,000-sf Integrated Materials Research Laboratory, which houses many of SNL's existing state-of-the-art nanotech assets, and is adjacent to the Microelectronics Development Laboratory, which features 30,000 sf of Class 100 or better cleanroom for microelectronics, MEMS, and photonics fabrication. The Integrated Materials Research Lab integrates research from the atomic scale through the development of electronic devices to full-scale mechanical components.

The CINT Gateway to Los Alamos, which is being developed concurrently with the Core Facility, will be a 34,000-sf facility that leverages LANL's bioscience and materials research capabilities. It will provide support space for cell activity, chemical and solid-state synthesis, advanced scanning probes, laser spectroscopy, and property measurement. It will also provide convenient access to the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, two existing user facilities located at LANL. The CINT gateway facility is expected to be complete in October 2005.

"The gateways are the launch pads that enable CINT users to have a home base within Sandia and Los Alamos, but still go out and use other lab capabilities," says Shinn.

Programmed for Integration

The primary mission of CINT is to create an environment of synergy and integration where chemists, physicists, biologists, and computer analysts from diverse backgrounds can work together as one scientific community. As a result, CINT capabilities will be available at no cost to university and industrial researchers if the results are published. A mechanism for proprietary research is also available. Access to CINT is via a peer-reviewed user proposal process.

Though SNL is on a secure air force base, the CINT Core Facility is located adjacent to a technology park outside the base boundary to promote open access and collaboration.

"Successful collaboration with the external scientific community is essential in the development of CINT," says Shinn.

In the Core Facility, flexible conference rooms with partitions and lunch areas are stationed in the courtyard between wings and other shared spaces. Open and closed office clusters are deliberately scattered throughout the complex to facilitate pedestrian traffic flow and increase social interaction. Initial designs included mostly open offices, but federal security requirements dictate that a majority of the offices be closed. The closed offices will accommodate resident scientists and long-term visitors, while the open offices will be assigned to short-term visitors and students.

"Security and other operational issues drove us to create about 80 percent closed offices, but we did retain a small amount of open space hoping that these clusters will become the hotspots where graduate students and visitors congregate and invent the unpredictable," says Shinn.

Secure Access

Because it is a federal facility, security at CINT will be highly layered. All personnel, including users and visitors, will be issued I.D. badges. Lab access will be controlled using a keycard database and predefined security zones within the building.

From a communications standpoint, the Core Facility will have internal high-speed data networks and secure wide area networks that double back to SNL and LANL. Wireless intranet for the Core is also in the works, pending future DOE regulations.

"Environment, Safety & Health training is a high priority for us. We want this building to be accessible to the public, yet we don't want anyone getting hurt," explains Shinn. "We have established zones within the building controlled by individual card readers. Personnel and visitors won't be able to open a laboratory door unless they've been certified and trained, and that information is in the database."

Construction of the Core Facility is slated to begin in 2004 with completion scheduled for late 2005 and occupancy in the spring of 2006.

By Johnathon Allen

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