The Clean Room

The main facility of this Research Centre is the Clean Room and associated laboratories. This substantial resource has the capability to make magnetic thin film heads, coat computer disks and evaluate advanced materials of micro and nano dimensions. The facility was first established in 1986 and has had various upgrades from since then. The last upgrade, completed in 2005 was as a result of a grant of £195,000 from the Royal Society/Wolfson Foundation initiative. It was one of 12 grants awarded nationally in competition with bids from 50 other universities. It created a new ‘Class 10’ nanotechnology area in addition to upgrading some other parts of the overall facility. Recently, as part of European and DTI grants we have acquired a state-of-the art Mask Aligner, a device-quality spintronics multi-target deposition system with load locked UHV chambers and a Nano-R 3D Atomic Force Microscope (AFM). The AFM is housed in the new ‘nano’ area together with an advanced (GUZIK) computer disk test system awarded via Dr Davey by Maxtor in the USA. We now have four major Nordico thin film coating systems, a Varian ion beam evaporator, Edwards evaporator, two gold wire bonders, dicing saws, a surface lapping capability, two vibrating sample magnetometers, B-H testers, a four point probe magneto-resistance measuring system and two high frequency impedance analysers (up to 7 GHz). In addition to this is another laboratory dedicated to optical and sensors research which includes low and high resolution television based magneto -optic confocal microscopes for magnetic domain imaging and surface profiling. We are modifying part of this laboratory for high frequency measurements to support the research in Giant Magneto Impedance (GMI). The Clean Room complex has now been designated (in consultation with the Royal Society) as the Wolfson  Nanomagnetics Laboratory.

The clean room at CRIST is an industry standard clean room (class 10), equiped with state-of-the-art thin-film deposition, micro-fabrication and magnetic measurement facilities. The equipment includes:

• Three RF-spluttering machines, evaporation machines
• One Guzik spinstand
  Two mask aligner
• Ion bean milling machines
• Two Vibrating magnetometer
• Kerr effect M-H loop plotters
• Gigahertz spectrum analysers
• Magnetic measurement and magnetic domain observation instruments
• In addition to this list we build our own specialist equipment for demonstrating our work and use the Departmental computing facilities.