History and Overview of the Michigan Nanofabrication Facility (MNF)
The Michigan Nanofabrication Facility (MNF) is located in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Building and operated by the Solid State Electronics Laboratory. The facility first opened in September 1986 and was fully operational in 1988. It was renamed Michigan Nanofabrication Facility in January 2005.
It consists of a Class 1000/100/10 research laboratory with approximately 6,000 square feet of work area and a separate Class 10,000 instructional laboratory of approximately 1,000 square feet which supports formal courses. The research laboratory consists of five process bays (silicon lithography/diffusion, silicon LPCVD, compound semiconductor devices, thin-film deposition, and dry etching) plus five separate, connected rooms for e-beam lithography and metrology (Class 10) and for compound semiconductor materials growth.
The MNF is supported by a lab manager and a staff of 12 engineers and technicians whose primary responsibility is to ensure that the equipment is well maintained and characterized. In addition, the MNF has four staff members whose primary responsibility is to provide training and support users and their projects. The MNF also employs a full time staff engineer for support of the instructional laboratory, which also relies on teaching assistants; graduate students and process engineers for support of the classes. Graduate students perform most of the processing in MNF as part of their doctoral thesis projects. There are also five process engineers who continually process complete devices for specific research projects. The facility is also used by a number of local firms, both large and small, by other universities, and by remote users who can send in their orders to be processed by the laboratory staff.