The Melbourne Centre for Nanofabrication

A national facility for nano-scale fabrication and integration.

The Melbourne Centre for NanoFabrication will provide Australia’s leading scientists and engineers with the tools to build miniature devices that could potentially revolutionise the health care and environmental maintenance sectors.

The MCN will couple state of the art instrumentation for nano and micro scale fabrication – that is, for fabrication at the scale of 1/100,000 and 1/10,000 of a human hair – with purpose built laboratories for making ever smaller, more powerful and more effective devices such as drug delivery devices, diagnostics and water sensing for improving our health and the health of our environment.

Vision

To generate skills and beneficial opportunities in the micro-nano-bio sciences and technologies through the multidisciplinary and multi-institutional interactions between researchers and commercial participants within an environment and using unique supporting infrastructure that is a National Facility with its headquarters in Victoria.

Mission

The vision will be achieved by –

• Acquiring advanced manufacturing R&D capability
  • plant & equipment
  • scientists & technicians
  • building infrastructure – clean rooms, PC2 labs, GMP facilities
• Establishing effective project management protocols to assist clients assemble productive, multi-disciplinary teams for individual projects
• Engaging with industry through dedicated relationship management capability to ensure the needs of clients are well understood and solutions are tailored to their commercial needs and individual parameters
• Gathering market intelligence for local small to medium size enterprises (SME) to ensure they understand where their individual markets are heading
• Monitoring competitors to better understand market directions for MCN clients

Objectives

The objective of the MCN will be to assist the Victorian business and research sector achieve global competitiveness in nano technologies for medical and environmental applications.

The Facility will leverage from the investments made by the State and Commonwealth Governments over the last 30 to 40 years in biotech to deliver a biotech sector built around devices, such as drug delivery systems.

Themes

Infrustructure & Equipment

The construction and commissioning of a micro and nano fabrication facility in Melbourne will provide local researchers and industry with the means of producing complex micro and nanoscience based devices using a vast array of tools that are not available collectively elsewhere in Australia.  Such ‘prototype’ devices include scientific, medical, environmental sensing, food quality monitoring, lab on a chip, chemical production and energy producing devices. Such a facility is a way of attaining world class infrastructure only available on the scale of such a joint investment.

Governance & Structure

The MCN has been designed to be an open-access world class bio-nano fabrication capability focussed on health and environmental applications.  It will comprise a national facility, integrated with local sub-node facilities housed within the MCN partners – CSIRO,RMIT University, MiniFAB (Aust) Pty Ltd, Swinburne University, Small Technologies Cluster Pty Ltd, La Trobe University, the University of Melbourne and Monash University.  Its funding will be provided by NCRIS, the State Government and the project proposal partners.

Four other major nodes will be established nationally under the NCRIS programme for fabrication.  Each major node will be operationally independent and required to design and establish its own structure and governance model, including its local sub-nodes.

The investment will be in equipment and infrastructure.  MCN will comprise biological and non-biological fabrication techniques, e.g. photolithography, deposition, self-assembly, synthesis, dicing, bonding, testing and modelling tools as well as systems integration capabilities, housed within dedicated laboratories and clean rooms, open to research users who will also have access local environments to work with other scientific disciplines an institutions. The goal is to maximize cross-disciplinary interaction.

A large scale nano-fabrication capability will allow Victorian researchers and industry to produce world competitive nano-scientific outcomes with high publication and industrial impact.  The ability to rapidly prototype and prove a concept for scientific and/or commercial reasons is an international competitive advantage.  Furthermore, the capability has uniquely been designed to maximise collaboration and output by scientists across the physical and biomedical sciences.  These factors are now critical for high end scientific publication and for technology translation in an industrial context. The facility will also aid in the hiring of and collaboration with international leaders.

The proposed structure and governance model for the Victorian Node is set out below.

National Structure – ANFF, the Australian National Fabrication Facility

At a national level, Australian National Fabrication Facility manages the entire NCRIS fabrication investment by the Commonwealth Government and to ensure the four major nodes adhere to their proposed strategies.  It oversees the Victorian, NSW, Queensland, ANU and South Australian Nodes. For more information click here. 

MCN - Victorian Node

Structure

The MCN will be independent of and report to ANFF, and will comprise –

• a purpose built national nano/micro fabrication facility
• nodal units dispersed around the partners’ facilities

MCN, will be structured as an unincorporated joint venture between the partners, Monash University, CSIRO, MiniFAB (Australia) Pty Ltd, STC Pty Ltd, RMIT University, the University of Melbourne, Swinburne University and LaTrobe University (membership TBD, based on contributions). 

The joint venture appointed Monash University, through the Monash Institute for Nanosciences, Materials and Manufacture to report to ANFF.