Cleanroom

Cleanroom

A large cleanroom for micro- and nanofabrication provides researchers with a flexible environment and tools for lithography, wet processing, dry etching, thermal processes, thin-film deposition or metrology and characterization.

This cleanroom facility — in combination with four ETH Zurich professorships located at the Binnig and Rohrer Nanotechnology Center — is the centerpiece of a 10-year strategic partnership in nanoscience between IBM Research, ETH Zurich and EMPA, where scientists can research novel nanoscale structures and devices to drive the future of information technology and nanoscience.

Noisefree labs

IBM’s noise-free labs

IBM has developed six proprietary noise-free labs that are designed to shield extremely sensitive experiments from disturbances such as vibrations, electro-magnetic fields, temperature fluctuations and acoustic noise.

Particular attention was paid to eliminating the mutual derogation of the various measures to enable unprecedented performance of the novel research platform.

Heinrich Rohrer and Gerd Binnig

Gerd Binnig & Heinrich Rohrer

The Binnig and Rohrer Nanotechnology Center is named after Gerd Binnig (standing) and Heinrich Rohrer, the two IBM scientists and Nobel laureates who invented the scanning tunneling microscope at the IBM Research – Zurich Laboratory in 1981, thus enabling researchers to see atoms on a surface for the first time.