[labnetwork] cost recovery

[John Shott]

Rick:

It will be interesting to see the responses to this question ... in my 
experience there is a greater lab-to-lab variation in how people charge 
for lab usage than anything else.

Here is what we do at the Stanford Nanofabrication Facility.  Details 
are at http://snf.stanford.edu/join/fees.htm, but I'll provide more of a 
prose discussion of what we do and why.

First, we don't charge a monthly access fee and we don't charge for 
being in the clean room.

We charge one of three hourly rates for equipment usage: most equipment 
is charged at $75 per hour for academic users.  Wet benches, manual 
spinners, and a number of basic characterization tools are charged at 
$50 per hour (2/3 of the base rate).  Three tools (Raith 150 ebeam, ASML 
i-line stepper, and AMAT Centura epi) are charged at $92 per hour.  
Industrial rates are double that of academic rates for all tools.

We then have what we call the "notched" cap.  If your equipment use 
charges reach $3000 in a month (the equivalent of 40-hours of base-rate 
equipment usage), your equipment charges don't go up ... unless you 
exceed 160 hours of equipment use in a month.  If that happens, you 
begin to get charged again at 25% of the original rate for each tool.  
The industrial equipment cap kicks in at $6000, so both the "flat" 
portion and the non-zero slope kick in at the same point in terms of 
hours of usage.  The purpose of the slope after 160 hours of equipment 
usage is both to prevent equipment hogging and to discourage people from 
working around the clock for extended periods of time.

I view the cap as a volume-discount in the hourly equipment rate for our 
biggest users.  We have survived many audits ... although I believe that 
auditors are genetically predisposed to dislike anything other than a 
flat hourly rate.

Oh, one minor wrinkle: we also charge for precious metals (Au, At, Pt, 
and Pd, and Ir, I think) based on the net weight used for each of those 
materials (labmembers weight the target/crucible before and after their 
deposition) and those precious metal charges are not subject to capping.

Staff usage for processing wafers and training are charged on an 
uncapped basis of about $60 and $90 per hour, respectively.  That rate 
is applied equally to academic and non-academic users.

People like the cap because it is predictable in terms of budgeting and 
proposal writing.  It also doesn't penalize folks for taking longer to 
get something done (in a given month) than they might have first 
envisioned.  The users who only use a lab a few hours a month probably 
don't like it because their hourly rate has to be higher than the "true" 
cost of that usage (otherwise the cap can't work ...) but they still get 
access to a lot of equipment, technology, and infrastructure for a 
pretty reasonable hourly rate.

Let me know if you have any questions,

John


On 3/19/2013 11:32 AM, Morrison, Richard H., Jr. wrote:
>
> Hi All,
>
> Draper is investigating cost recovery for our new Microfabrication 
> Center. Right now we charge a flat fee of $117 per hour to recover 
> cost. I was wondering what others did in this regard. I have the 
> presentation from UGIM on the Berkeley Marvell center but I was 
> wondering if others could share their detail with me.
>
> Thanks
> Rick
>

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