Nanotech site grows

ONAMI center taking shape on HP campus

By BENNETT HALL
Gazette-Times business editor

Nine months after a splashy grand opening that drew 250 enthusiastic supporters, the Corvallis headquarters of the Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnologies Institute remains more promise than reality.

Construction workers still outnumber researchers at the facility, housed in donated space in Building 11 of Hewlett-Packard's local campus, as the painstaking process of installing air ducts, reconfiguring water mains and upgrading the power supply grinds on.

An array of sophisticated manufacturing equipment stands idle at the far end of the unfinished fabrication area, awaiting the day when it can fulfill its purpose: to create the prototypes for a whole new generation of powerful devices operating on the smallest scale imaginable.

That day is coming, says Skip Rung, the institute's director and the state's most impassioned evangelist for the potential of tiny technology.

"We are within a month of being complete with the outfitting construction," he said Thursday during a tour of the facility. "The first tool should be hooked up in about a month."

While he admits that startup is taking longer than he had hoped, Rung says it's important to note the progress the institute is making on other fronts:

• Ongoing research projects continue at ONAMI's partner universities, Oregon State, Portland State and Oregon.

• The state has set aside $9.5 million toward renovation of Graf Hall at OSU, slated to become ONAMI's permanent home after 2007, when its free lease at HP runs out.

• Over the past year or so, microtechnology researchers at OSU and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the key federal partner in the ONAMI collaboration, have landed more than $20 million in research funding.

• Industry partners such as Hewlett-Packard, FEI and Electro Scientific Industries have come through with promised donations of big-ticket machinery ranging from lasers to high-temperature ovens to a machine that can can put down materials in layers a single atom thick.

• The governor made ONAMI a line item in his budget proposal, asking for $7 million over the next two years.

• And just this week, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory named a program manager for the Microproducts Breakthrough Institute, a unit of ONAMI based in Corvallis.

"He is their advance guard, and we are on track to bring PNNL researchers here," Rung said.

PNNL program manager Dennis Stiles will also become a co-director of ONAMI, underscoring the importance of the role the federal research center will play in the Oregon institute's development.

Speaking by phone from his PNNL office in Richland, Wash., Stiles said he planned to be working full-time in Corvallis by June or July. He expects to bring between five and eight scientists from the national laboratory to work in ONAMI's temporary quarters, adding to their ranks when the permanent location is finished at OSU.

"Initially we're a bit constrained by the available laboratory space (at ONAMI)," Stiles said. "Once Graf Hall is available, we'll have about 20."

The initial focus of the PNNL contingent and their OSU research partners will be on an Army-funded project to create small, highly efficient heating and cooling systems. One application, Stiles said, would likely be for cooling protective suits for soldiers working around chemical weapons or other hazards.

Another project involves developing small-scale energy systems for NASA, which might use the devices to generate power on spacecraft, orbiting platforms or a permanent base on Mars.

One of ONAMI's goals is to generate commercial products that could create jobs for Oregonians, and Rung said the first one out of the chute is likely to be a portable dialysis unit being developed for a Portland company called Home Dialysis Plus. The company foresees a lucrative market among kidney patients, who now must make frequent visits to a clinic for blood-cleaning dialysis treatment.

In a best-case scenario, that product could be for sale two years from now.

Yet another ONAMI project that's farther off but potentially even farther-reaching involves constructing a lunchbox-sized device to convert a liquid fuel such as methanol into hydrogen to power an automobile fuel cell. According to Rung, this process could make existing fuels twice as efficient while reducing pollution.

"If you have a device that can improve worldwide fuel efficiency by a factor of two, it's hard to imagine anything much bigger than that," he said.