Polifab born, to the makers of the nano-engineering with the ball – The Republic

EVEN in Italian craftsmanship of the twenty-first century can be made of silicon nanostructures. And if philosophy is that of the makers, based on collaboration and manufacturing (in the material sense of the word), now in Milan there is a place where researchers, start-ups and companies can try to create some device with very small and art technology. It is the new fab lab of the Polytechnic of Milan, Polifab: a playground for anyone who intends to nanoelectronics, photonics, nanomagnetism, spintronics, organic electronics, instrumentation with eight million euro inherited from Pirelli Labs (now discontinued), remittance a shiny thanks to an investment of two million more by the university Milanese.
center, inside the Campus Leonardo, was officially opened on 3 July and is ready to host experimentation both engineers and researchers at the Technical University, both of local companies who want to launch manufacturing innovation. The nerve center of Polifab is the cleanroom or clean room: an area of ​​about 400 square meters with a very low concentration of particles in the atmosphere, where it comes wrapped in white suits and where men can not have neither beard nor mustache.

“Here you will design new hardware tools, micro and nano-scale (respectively of the order of a thousandth of a millionth of a millimeter and, ed.),” says Lucio Pinto, president of Foundation Cife, which contributed to the birth of Polifab: “Today, 90% of start-ups focused on software. The researcher who develops a project must wait for someone on the outside, build his prototype, can not act directly. A workshop like this, with a clean room, it allows instead of making technology transfer directly, without further delay “.

What do you do exactly in this place? They build microscopic three-dimensional structures at the base of new products: magnetic thin films are deposited, you lithography optics and electronics. “It is a training ground for researchers, but not only,” adds Andrea Lacaita , director of the new center. “Here you can test if the ideas have legs to become products and get started. The tools we have, in fact, allow you to make not only prototypes of devices, but also pre-series of the industry. It goes far beyond the proof of concept: you can reach the threshold of industrialization. It works on a micro scale, but you can get up to a resolution of 20 nanometers. “

The portfolio already has a dozen projects launched. To name a few: biosensors for diagnostics in medicine, for example, to detect markers of certain cancers (the project involves the collaboration FIRC Institute of Molecular Oncology – IFOM), new components for the photovoltaic, magnetic memories and neuromorphic circuits, which They have already attracted the interest of Intel. For this project, in particular, the Polytechnic has won a grant from the European Research Council which will bring significant funding: two million euro over five years (2015-2012).

It is the only public infrastructure that It allows you to make frontier research in the field of microtechnology in Lombardy, and one of the few in Italy (the other two are at the Politecnico di Torino and at the Fondazione Bruno Kessler of Trento). “Setting this up today, in a context of public financing looking very content, a cleanroom of this type requires courage, because its maintenance is expensive – continues Lacaita – but initial findings tell us that the industrial fabric is reactive. We knew the risks from the start, but we also know the creativity and skills of the researchers involved, able to find European channels of financing, very selective. “

Arguments:

polifab

makers

polytechnic milan

nano

Photonics

nanomagnetism

spintronics

PV

Starring:

Andrea Lacaita