The Boston College Integrated Sciences Clean Room and Nanofabrication Facility is laboratory comprised
of 1,500 square feet of Class 1,000 and Class 10,000 clean room spaces, meaning fewer than this many
particles per square foot under one micrometer in size. In addition, there is over 2,000 square feet of
service and support space. The lab is supported by an air handling unit that completely cleans and renews
all the air in the facility every 45 seconds.
Home to over 30 high-end micro- and nanoscale instrumentation systems worth several million dollars,
this laboratory enables highly sensitive materials and devices to be fabricated free from contaminants,
such as common airborne particles that are often much larger than the scientific devices being
constructed. Equipment includes ultraviolet photolithography devices; a probe station; and an atomic
force microscope with a resolution of less than one nanometer; specialty items such as a sputtering
evaporator, which knocks particles off a metal “target” and sets them down in a layer several nanometers
thick on a substrate, a flat piece of glass or plastic; an atomic layer depositor, which can set down
materials on a substrate in a layer that’s a single atom thick; and a focused ion beam device that can cut
and carve materials with under one nanometer of precision.