Wisconsin Governor Gets CVTC’s NanoRite Construction Underway

Ground for the $4.9 million NanoRite Center at the Gateway Campus of Chippewa Valley Technical College in Eau Claire was broken Wednesday, Oct. 4.

Governor Jim Doyle, a prominent supporter of the facility, announced that OEM Fabricators, an expanding metalworking firm in Woodville, would become the center’s first tenant and pursue microfabrication technologies.

Microfabrication is a technology of an incrementally larger scale than nanotechnology, but perhaps equally revolutionary. For instance, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is currently at work on a microturbine engine that would run on jet fuel and be small enough to replace the battery of a laptop computer! Such small-scale machining will create untold new products and has captured the interest of OEM Fabricators and other forward-thinking machine tool firms.

“We look forward to being part of the NanoRite Center’s accomplishments over the years as it seeks to become an important player in this very promising field of science and industry,” said S. Mark Tyler, president of OEM Fabricators.

In addition to OEM’s tenancy in NanoRite, the firm will contribute $100,000 to the construction of the facility.

Barely twenty years in business, OEM recently began construction on a 54,000 square foot plant in Neillsville that will employ 200. The firm already employs 200 at its site in Woodville.

The 37,000 square foot NanoRite facility will abut the Gateway Campus and share a class 100 clean room, a high-end microscopy lab, and the talent and energies of faculty and students from CVTC’s Nanoscience Technology program.

The University of Wisconsin-Stout and the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire are partners in NanoRite, which is a concept as much as a building. UW-Stout plans academic programming in nanobiotechnology and UW-Eau Claire has already established a high-tech Materials Science center. The efforts underscore the economic development aspect of the center.

"We've made enormous progress over the last four years to build a growing, high-tech economy," Governor Doyle said. "While we still have more to do, this is a major step forward for the Chippewa Valley and will help us continue to create the kind of high-paying jobs that will keep our young people in Wisconsin."

CVTC President Bill Ihlenfeldt added, “We are working to create a high wage and high employment industry for the Chippewa and St. Croix valleys, and it’s increasingly clear that this pursuit of opportunity is going to bear fruit. OEM shares our optimism for these ultra-small technologies.”

One Scientific American writer, Mihail Roco, also an adviser to the National Science Foundation and a designer of the National Nanotechnology Initiative, wrote recently that nanotechnology will evolve in four overlapping stages.

The first stage “involves the development of passive nanostructures.” The second, already begun, “focuses on active nanostructures that change their size, shape, conductivity or other properties during use.” In, for example, the third stage, beginning about 2010, “Medicine could employ . . . systems to improve the tissue compatibility of implants . . . or even build artificial organs.” The fourth stage, highly speculative, might include genetic therapies and human-electronic interfaces.

“We have learned also that microfabrication may be the best forerunner to nano,” Ihlenfeldt said. The CVTC president sees the two technologies as different primarily in scale. West central Wisconsin’s proximity to the Twin Cities metro area will be important.

One of the first markets to open up for nano or microfab products is the medical device industry. That will become more important as we move forward,” the CVTC president predicted. CVTC’s NanoRite Center has space for five wet labs, as currently configured, up to 15 offices and two conference rooms, and three larger labs more than 4,000 square feet each. The facility will also adjoin a microfabrication lab, soon to be equipped with a Swiss Screw Machine capable of microscopic tolerances.

The wet labs will have access to or include utilities and features like vacuum, compressed air, autoclave and reverse osmosis.

NanoRite is expected to open in September 2007.

Funding for the center was made possible by 3M, the William J. and Gertrude R. Casper Foundation, the City of Eau Claire, CVTC, the CVTC Foundation, Eau Claire County, the Gateway Corporation, OEM Fabricators, Inc., the State of Wisconsin, the U.S. Department of Commerce—Economic Development Administration and Xcel Energy.

Copyright Chippewa Valley Technical College.