IBM Using Super Quiet Rooms for New Nano Research
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Whether you realize it or not, the world is permeated with thousands of tiny vibrations from hundreds of sources all the time. For most, this tends not to matter; these things just fade into the background noise of everyday life. When doing research on the exceptionally small, however, anything and everything can interfere.
IBM has finished its first noise-free laboratories at the Binnig and Rohrer Nanotechnology centers in Zurich, Switzerland. The new labs are shielding the chip manufacturer's microscopes from just about anything -- EMF, stray vibrations and more.
Cnet has the full story, as well some exceptional photos of the lab.
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7 Comments
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expl0itfinder It's interesting how such seemingly miniscule factors could have enough of an effect on the instrumentation that IBM felt the need to drop so much money on blocking them out. (The room costed $50,000 per square foot.)Reply -
MKBL Sometimes I wonder how accurately such research can depict real life situation. Virtually no object in this world exists in such condition, so even if the researcher can acquire some data of a particular object, it is only under the extremely-controlled environment, which doesn't exist in real. Question is how we can apply the data in real. Of course we've been doing that so far to certain success rate, but this one I doubt.Reply -
cemerian you got it wrong the room is for research and manufacturing(sort of) just like no hardware you got ets damaged by dust but its manufactured in dust free envirioment, these quite rooms are for research in building nano techReply -
Duckhunt IBM the failure blows more cash on more failure. It will be funny when they get bought out by someone in the near future like xerox.Reply