A new seven-story, $127-million building devoted to commercialization of school technologies at the University of California at Berkeley was formally opened last Friday, and its features provide a model for other campuses looking for best practices in designing facilities to encourage tech transfer. The 141,000-square-foot building, designed by SmithGroup, mixes research space with collaboration areas, offices, and conference rooms. In addition, the building houses two 15,000-square-foot “clean rooms” for manufacturing microchips “at resolutions 100,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair,” the university says. To keep vibration levels down, the nanofabrication labs sit on concrete slabs 39 inches thick. The building also has a main-floor technology museum, a cybercafe, and a 149-seat auditorium. It will house the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society, or Citrus, which brings industrial partners together with researchers from the university system’s Berkeley, Davis, Merced, and Santa Cruz campuses.

Go to: The Chronicle of Higher Education

Posted March 5th, 2009 under Tech Transfer

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