With cumulative capital investment exceeding £150m, it has a history of translating physics into physical realities that have transformed society over the last 60 years.
As one of the premier research cleanrooms in Europe, it has a unique range of established and cutting-edge capabilities.
The Zepler Cleanrooms planar fabrication capabilities are mainly provided by the Southampton Nanofabrication Centre and the Integrated Photonics Cleanroom.
The Southampton Nanofabrication Centre offers up to 200mm wafer processing. The Integrated Photonics Cleanroom offers up to 150mm including a widened range of permitted materials.
Both cleanrooms have a range of capabilities. These allow complete device fabrication, and the flexibility to work with diced samples up to wafer batches. We are home to the UK’s only deep-ultraviolet scanner and Europe's most advanced electron beam lithography facility in an academic setting.
We provide optical fibre fabrication in our silica fibre facility. We manufacture and research hollow core and rare earth doped fibres for telecoms, fibre amplifiers and fibre lasers.
In our focused ion beam facility we provide areas suitable for nanostructuring semiconductors. In our hybrid materials and devices facility, we provide fabrication and characterisation of thin film materials from solution. Example applications include flexible or wearable opto and optoelectronic devices and battery research.
The novel and compound glass facility offers a range of specialised glass making, fibre drawing equipment, and furnaces. These are used for 2D materials including Chalcogenides.
The flame hydrolysis deposition facility is a state-of-the-art system for growth of silica. This is then used to form waveguide structures for integrated photonic circuits.