"The Bangalore centre is already the largest one outside our headquarters and we are building critical mass now. We intend broadening out product portfolio and are accelerating our investments to grow despite the costly litigation going on (with Synopsys Inc.)," said Roy Jewell, president and chief operating officer at Magma (Santa Clara, CA).

"The Noida centre will have 20 engineers by the year-end and will be in the custom design space. This new centre will help the company address a bigger part of the EDA market," Jewell added.

"Our Bangalore centre has 90 engineers now and this city is stronger in rolling out IC designs, while Noida is stronger when it comes to EDA skill availability," said Anand Anandkumar, managing director, Magma Design Automation India Pvt. Ltd. The company plans to double its staff numbers during the next 12 months, he added.

Among other EDA firms, Cadence Design Systems Inc. has two R&D centres in India, here and in Noida, while Synopsys has two centers, here and in Hyderabad. Mentor Graphics too has two centres, in Hyderabad and Noida, while Sequence Design has one centre in the country, in Noida.

Motorola to Set up Manufacturing Plant in India
Motorola Inc. has planned to set up a plant in India to manufacture both mobile devices and network infrastructure equipment, according to a Reuters report.

"We are on track for a manufacturing presence in India. An announcement is imminent," the report quoted Stu Reed, EVP of the company's supply chain operations, as saying. Other reports expect the plant to be located near Chennai in southern India, where Finland's Nokia and Taiwan's Foxconn are building plants for telecom equipment.

Motorola has tapped India's software skill base for years and employs over 2,000 engineers in development centers throughout India, including an applied research lab in Bangalore.

Omron Opens Facility in Shanghai for Control Components
Omron Corp. celebrated the completion of Omron (Shanghai) Co. Ltd (OMS), its new subsidiary in Shanghai, China. OMS will serve as the global design and production center for Omron's control components and systems equipment. Festivities were held last June 6 with top Omron executives in attendance.

OMS was first established in July 2005 by merging three Omron Group companies in Shanghai: Shanghai Omron Automation System Co. Ltd, established in 1993; Omron (Shanghai) Co. Ltd, established in 1994; and Omron (Shanghai) Control System Engineering Co. Ltd, established in 2003.

Omron's Industrial Automation Co. (IAB) has promoted business operations that are rooted in the Chinese market over the past years. The chief aims of OMS are to supply reliable, high-performance control components and systems equipment from Shanghai to manufacturing sites around the world, while also contributing to the development of the manufacturing industry in China.

OMS provides functions for manufacturing, and will serve as a global design/production center for IAB. The company said it can handle product design, development and production to logistics and customer support services. OMS will be engaged in design, development, production and supply of basic control components and systems equipment. Products to be handled include sensors, programmable logic controllers, temperature controllers and various other controllers.

According to current plans, OMS will have a 2,200-strong staff and production volume of approximately $319.54 million in FY2007. OMS is 100 percent owned by Omron (China) Co. Ltd.

Birck Nanotechnology Center Opens
The Birck Nanotechnology Center at Purdue University on Monday (June 12) opened its $10 million Scifres Nanofabrication Laboratory to researchers.

The 25,000-square-foot cleanroom provides Purdue scientists with nanofabrication labs to advance research at the nanoscale level and design the next generation of electronic devices similar to the transistors and circuits in computer chips.

"Several leading U.S. universities have large labs for nanotech research, but those facilities were designed primarily for semiconductor electronics," said George Adams, Birck's research development manager. "At Birck, the cleanroom and labs are the nation's first designed specifically for the breadth of nanotechnology research, making them better suited for this emerging science."

Initially, 44 faculty members and nearly 200 researchers and graduate students will use the $58 million Birck Nanotechnology Center, many working in the cleanroom and related laboratories. The Discovery Park cleanroom provides two types of research space:

"A single nanoscale device may require processing in both of these incompatible environments," Adams said. "At Birck, the cleanroom is specially linked — something no other cleanroom in the world has."

Several companies and organizations have expressed an interest in using Birck's facilities, specifically the cleanroom and biocleanroom, to help gain a competitive edge in the $227 billion global semiconductor chip market.

"Now that the cleanroom is up and running, we expect interest from industrial and corporate partners in what research we will be able to do for them in the growing, dynamic field of nanotechnology," Adams said.

Although dust particles are microscopic, they're actually larger than many of the features in devices built through nanotechnology, making cleanrooms critical to any research at this tiny scale. Nano is a prefix meaning one-billionth. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter, or only about 10 atoms wide.

Researchers in Birck's cleanroom will work with some of the most sophisticated equipment used for advancing research in the commercial nanofabrication process related to:

• Patterning - Researchers will use a $6 million ultra-high resolution Leica Vector Beam photolithography system. The new instrument, one of less than a dozen like it in the world, creates nanoscale patterns on wafers with an electron beam. The system can either draw these patterns directly on a wafer that has been spin-coated with an electron-sensitive material or can create very high-resolution masks that use optical technology to create the image on wafers. The narrowest line that can be drawn is about six nanometers, or about 20 atoms, wide.

• Masking - An optical pattern generator, donated by Raytheon Co., creates photo masks, which act like photographic negatives in patterning silicon wafers. This instrument rests on a 4,000-pound granite table in a Birck lab that is specially lit to protect photo- sensitive images on the chips.

• Etching - With a $2 million instrument, Purdue researchers can take the wafer image through the etching process. The image created in the patterning step is used as a mask to allow the surface below the pattern to be selectively etched. The instrument for this process, known as a reactive ion etcher, uses high-energy plasma to create ions to etch the pattern into the wafer.

• Deposition - Purdue has installed two atomic layer deposition systems on campus, allowing Birck researchers to add thin films with atomic layer precision. These highly specialized films allow the fabrication of extremely high-performance computer chips and other novel nanomaterials.

• Diffusion - Furnaces that achieve temperatures of up to 1,200 degrees Celsius alter the electrical characteristics, or conductivity, in specific areas of the silicon wafer. Manufacturer LSI Logic Corp. has donated six furnaces for this function that will be installed over the next few months.

Researchers must wear gowns, gloves, masks, head and shoe coverings, and take elaborate precautions to cleanse themselves before entering the cleanroom, said Birck facility manager John Weaver. He said Birck's cleanroom has areas that are rated based on the number of particles allowed in each cubic foot of air.

The least-clean portion of the cleanroom, which is about 15 percent of the total area, is about 1,000 times cleaner than the average office and contains less than 100 particles the size of a micron, or millionths of a meter, per cubic foot of air. About 40 percent of the cleanroom is an additional 10 times cleaner, with less than 10 particles per cubic foot of air. The remaining 45 percent of the cleanroom is 10 times cleaner still, with less than one particle per cubic foot of air.

"It's a self-cleaning lab to a certain extent," Weaver said. "The continuous flow of clean air removes the small, aerosol particles. We still need to manually clean the rooms of the larger particles, and it takes a trained crew to do that."   The research promises to make possible a new class of portable detectors for a range of applications, such as sensors for quickly testing food for bacterial contamination and sampling the air for biological and chemical warfare agents, as well as advanced medical diagnostic devices for analyzing blood and bodily fluids.

But the biocleanroom must be sterile as well as free of particles, requiring a different type of air handling and design. "The biological cleanroom and the nanofabrication cleanroom share a common boundary, and we can move materials back and forth between both labs," Adams said. "Nobody has done that before in a nanofabrication cleanroom anywhere in the world."

Researchers from both labs can work together on the same experiments by using "glove boxes" common to both labs. A researcher in the biocleanroom will reach into the glove box from one side, and a researcher in the nanofabrication room will reach in from the other side.

An example of how the nanofabrication cleanroom and biocleanroom can work together is illustrated in research led by Rashid Bashir, a professor of electrical and computer engineering. His team is creating devices called "biochip" detectors that combine proteins and other biological molecules with electronic components.

In addition, the biocleanroom is purposely located near the walkway that connects Birck with the Bindley Bioscience Center, the $15 million research facility that also opened last October for research in life science and bioscience.

The Scifres Nanofabrication Lab is named for Purdue alumni Donald and Carol Scifres, who donated $10 million to the Birck Center.

The 187,000-square-foot Birck Nanotechnology Center, which opened Oct. 8, 2005, involves Purdue faculty, researchers, staff members and graduate students from 27 schools and departments.

When the Birck Center is fully operational by October 2006, the facility will have a staff of 300 nanotechnology researchers addressing everything from super-small computers, spacecraft and microscopic machines to tiny life-saving medical devices and a plethora of new materials.

"Birck is a one-of-a-kind facility for nanotechnology research on a university campus in this country," Adams said. "And because of the facility and the advanced equipment and cleanrooms, we have been able to recruit top faculty and students in nanotechnology areas."

The Birck Center is named for Michael and Katherine (Kay) Birck, of Hinsdale, Ill. The Bircks contributed $30 million for the building. Michael Birck is a Purdue alumnus, member of the Purdue board of trustees and chairman of Naperville, Ill.-based Tellabs Inc.

Alumni William B. and Mary Jane Elmore provided $2 million toward the center's William and Mary Jane Elmore Advanced Concept Validation Laboratory.

The Birck Center is a cornerstone for Discovery Park, Purdue's $300 million hub for interdisciplinary research and home to 10 established research centers focusing on endeavors ranging from biosciences and manufacturing to oncological sciences and health-care engineering.

BM Opens Research Center in Russia
IBM Corp. opened its first development center in Russia on Tuesday, pledging investments of $40 million over three years to tap Russia's computing talent. The center will focus on mainframe technology development and will quintuple its current staff of 40 specialists by 2008, IBM officials said. While IBM has previously worked with partner companies in Russia, it has had no dedicated research and development facilities. The Moscow office joins the company's overseas R&D efforts in India, China and Brazil. "It develops our commitment to the business opportunities as we see them in the Russian Federation. It's one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, and our business operations here are one of the fastest portions of IBM," said Sam Palmisano, IBM's chairman and CEO.

NANOTECHNOLOGY

Georgia Tech’s Nanotechnology Facility to Receive Funds from Marcus Foundation
The Marcus Foundation announced a $15 million commitment for Georgia Tech’s Nanotechnology Research Center Building, a facility specifically designed to support interdisciplinary nanoscience and nanotechnology research.

The new building will have 30,000 square feet of cleanroom research space, one of the nation’s largest and an essential element of nanotechnology research. It will offer access to researchers from universities and industries in the region, helping to create new nanotechnology industries and attract industries that will benefit from nanoengineering.

Nanotechnology will produce materials ten times stronger than steel but much lighter in weight, digital storage units the size of sugar cubes that can hold all the information in the Library of Congress, and tiny medical devices that can detect individual cancer cells and target them with specialized treatment.

The commitment was triggered by the state of Georgia’s recent allocation of $38 million for the facility, which completes the state’s total project commitment of $45 million.

Bernard Marcus, the civic leader and philanthropist whose vision and investment made the Georgia Aquarium a reality, is also founder of the Marcus Foundation and serves as its chairman of the board.

“We are delighted to make this commitment for Georgia Tech’s Nanotechnology Research Center Building,” said Marcus. “Nanotechnology holds such amazing promise for truly revolutionizing many facets of our lives, specifically in medicine, while having the added benefit of economic development. The discoveries that will be possible as a result will prove the wisdom of the investment. I am pleased to partner with the state and Georgia Tech in making this research facility a reality.”

“As a son of Russian immigrants to our country, Bernie Marcus represents one of America’s great stories of what determination, hard work, and intelligence can accomplish in our great country,” said Georgia Tech President Wayne Clough. “In spite of setbacks, he realized his dream late in life as a businessman in creating The Home Depot and leading it to a level of success undreamed of. In retirement he once again is demonstrating his passion for life through his good works and philanthropy. He inspired our graduates at our May commencement with his insights, an address given in the shadow of the remarkable Georgia Aquarium, built because of his support and vision.