The nanotechnology program at Grand Valley State University (GVSU) was developed to support undergraduate and graduate education and research, as well as promote STEM education and retention with K-12 school districts. There are two lab spaces for this program: the Solid-State Electronics Fabrication lab (SSEF) and the Solid-State Electronics Characterization lab (SSEC). Our SSEF lab consists of a class 10,000 clean room with approximately 1,000 square feet of work area. The temperature and humidity of the lab are tightly controlled to be 70° ±5° and 42.5% ±3%, respectively. There are both processing and characterization equipment: a thermal evaporation system, oxidation furnaces, mask aligners, spin-coaters, wet chemistry benches, a scanning electron microscope (SEM), an atomic force microscope (AFM), optical microscopes, semiconductor parameter analyzers, and an ellipsometer. The SSEF lab is capable of processes including silicon-based optoelectronics and metal-gate NMOS and supports both undergraduate/graduate student’s research and education in the areas of solid-state devices, integrated circuits, and MEMs/NEMs. To support the K-12 STEM education, multiple educational modules and activities have been developed and team-taught with instructors in high school STEM classes.
