[labnetwork] Cleanroom consultant

Fri Jun 16 10:43:51 EDT 2023

Joe,

I’ll second Dennis’ comment about what the room needs to do before you start working on the design. I’ve seen the ‘what to we want’ question go unanswered well into the funding process, twice, in my career. Both were state schools and government cash was available.

Generally speaking, I would not use a building contractor to provide room design services. It’s easy to get lost in the weeds on the technical aspects and my local contactors bluster their way through the quoting. If you can hire a designer that can specifically do cleanrooms, (and provide references!!) you’re in much better shape.  I suggest cleanroomservices.com as a potential vendor, Ralph Kraft does excellent work.

Never let a builder certify their own work. Don’t release the final payment on the room until a third-party has certified the performance. If they balk on that as part of the contact, get another vendor.

Another warning- Be careful about corners getting cut by higher-ups without understanding the consequences.

Build # 1: I once had a facility director block my roomside replaceable HEPAs, used a cheaper option…while that’s not an entirely bad idea, but the room was certed to ISO-13485 annually and since the particle challenge was part of the certification, the entire ceiling needed to be opened up to get access to challenge the filters…every year…so after the certification testing, the room needed a deep clean and validation. This took the room down over two weeks, since it also needed biological testing. I would hope the filter designs now allow for such things (this was over a decade ago) but keep this sort of thing in mind. The needs and use of the room dictate the build.

Build #2: Makeup air was designed to be taken off the rooftop and conditioned, but this proved problematic to hit required RH levels in summertime. As a stopgap, the facility manager decided to draw makeup air from the building interstitial (a building over 30 years old). This did horrific things to the prefilters since the entire interstitial was loaded with 3 decades of dust, and occasionally the unclipped ceiling tiles (another facility manger decision) would make the cleanroom ceiling tiles raise and drop continually.

Same sort of logic applies to the DI water systems. Email me directly if you need to discuss that.

Regards,
Jeff

Jeff Salzmann
Assistant Professor of Research
Cleanroom Manager, Shared Instrumentation Laboratories
School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
University at Buffalo
114A Davis Hall
Buffalo, NY 14260
Tel: 716.645.2584
Email: jks7 at buffalo.edu<mailto:jks7 at buffalo.edu>
Shared Facilities: http://buffalo.edu/shared-facilities-equip

From: labnetwork <labnetwork-bounces at mtl.mit.edu> On Behalf Of Dennis Schweiger
Sent: Friday, June 16, 2023 6:31 AM
To: Joseph Losby <joseph.losby at ucalgary.ca>
Cc: labnetwork at mtl.mit.edu
Subject: Re: [labnetwork] Cleanroom consultant

Joe,

Good morning.  We too used AGI (formerly Abbie Gregg), now with AM Technical Solutions, with great success.  I would suggest you rally your group together and come up with a rough idea of what you'd like your fab to accomplish in the way of processing, then talk (lot's of talk) with peer institutions to see what worked for them, and what issues they had.  We had almost 20 years of cleanroom operation under our belt before we did our expansion, and at the time of our expansion design we toured several larger production fabs to get an idea for what we could do with our facility.  I will say that what we had originally laid out for as a tool set in our new fab, is not what we finally ended up with, however it was good enough to allow us to design the support infrastructure for our facility.

As always, you're more than welcome to come out and take a look at our facility.  I'd be happy to show you what we put together.

Dennis Schweiger
Facilities Manager
Lurie nanofabrication Facility
University of Michigan

734.647.2055 Ofc

"People can be divided into 3 groups - those that make things happen, those that watch things happen, and those that wonder what happened."  Within which group do you belong?

On Thu, Jun 15, 2023 at 5:15 PM Joseph Losby <joseph.losby at ucalgary.ca<mailto:joseph.losby at ucalgary.ca>> wrote:
Hi everyone,

I am wondering if you have ever sought the services of a cleanroom consultant when building a new facility?  We are contemplating going this route.  If so, do you have any recommendations?  Any other words of advice is appreciated.

Cheers,
Joe

Joseph Losby, PhD
Manager, qLab Operations

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