Descriptions of these instruments, Location, Required Trainings and the pricing for self unassisted use of these instruments can be explored by clicking any of the instrument in the table. For any additional information please contact the NCF staff.

Please note, the manuals are for reference only and sometimes may not depict actual working due to hardware or software updates. Please contact NCF staff if there are any questions or concerns.

Please note, Investigators from the Northwestern University and the University of Chicago are provided internal rates as all UIC users. All other users can access services but, at either external academic or external non-academic rate.

The NCF provides a variety of services for Facility Users, who are unable to perform these functions themselves for a number of reasons including time/distance constraints, the facilities and equipment are unavailable in their personal laboratories and they or their personnel are untrained in clean room semiconductor manufacturing-type processes and equipment.

These Users are typically academic faculty, postdocs and students performing research as well as industrial researchers requiring special equipment unavailable to them in their manufacturing facilities, which are often dedicated to manufacturing product, rather than conducting product research and development.

The NCF is particularly useful to new or recently established start-up companies, who do not have the facilities, equipment and/or processes necessary to create prototype devices in order to prove the R&D concepts are sound and that the device can be manufactured easily to top investor groups.
Some of these services include:

• Training on all clean room protocols, equipment and film processes. Processes can range from optical or electron beam photolithography to metal or insulator electron beam, sputtering, and plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition to reactive ion etching.
• Creation of thin film structures and devices either by assisting users during the process steps or actually being done solely by NCF staff.
• Consultation with NCF staff with years of experience in semiconductor device manufacturing techniques on possible means to accomplish a variety of R&D goals, using the equipment and processes available to all in the NCF clean room.
• Providing operating space for temporary equipment installation or storage of wafers, glassware, and chemicals used in their processes.

I encourage all possible future users to contact Dr. Seyoung An (syan11@uic.edu) to discuss their needs and see how the NCF can best meet those requirements.