FAQs about WFU's cleanroom...

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The WFU cleanroom was designed in-house by the NanoFabrik Group. This is a team of scientists and engineers at Wake that do the occasional engineering job for the "good of the school." Their solution to a cleanroom that was cost sustainable, easy to use, and reasonably priced to build was Suite 170 at N/QTL. The investment the school had to make was air handlers, some construction at the site and not much more. Furnishings, were repurposed for this cleanroom, the equipment was moved from Nanotech's old cleanroom after a rebuild. 

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The Wake Forest environmental management system (WFEM) manages everything from the caustic gases used in the RIE and PECVD systems, to the air velocities throughout the bays. The system controls the room air through a pressurized ceiling plenum that empties into a HEPA filtration system. This air is pre filtered by the air handlers before it enters the plenum. Virtual return plenums are created along the walls and floors by using directed air treatment systems thereby forming a 3D layered system of flow. This was originally designed by computer modeling (SimScale) and accounts for the movement of workers within the space.

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There are benefits to doing it this way and drawbacks as well. We are strictly limited to the number of people that can use the facility at a given time. Moreover fume hoods and other structures are not perfect class 100 (this is the case in many cleanrooms). Finally equipment mounts and box structures have separate dehumidification and air filtration. However, on the whole we get a class 100 environment that costs far less to run than more traditionally built environments. Estimates of operational costs at the WFU facility is ~ $33K/year (2025 dollars). And because we use spot monitoring throughout the facility, we can trace contamination quickly and effect remediation.