UA's Cleanest Room

Check out the “cleanest” room on The University of Alabama campus. It’s also one of the coolest.

Located in UA’s North Engineering Research Center, the clean room is formally known as the Microfabrication Facility.

Using the lab’s equipment, UA researchers create tiny structures needed for certain research applications, such as solar cells, semiconductor chips, computer disk drives and various nanosensors.

Clean rooms are environments in which airborne particles are controlled to specified limits. Drs. Subhadra “Su” Gupta and Alton Highsmith run, along with a team of graduates and undergraduates, UA’s facility.

Without particle controls, clothing debris, such as lint, human hair or even skin flakes could interfere with the coating practices involved in the manufacturing processes or create defects in miniature circuits.

The lab has three bays, the cleanest of which contains no more than 100 particles a millionth of a meter in size per cubic foot. The air in an average room has more than 8.3 million such particles per cubic meter.