Aug 24 2007
On Thursday, Aug. 23, top officials from the Department of Energy, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), Sandia National Laboratories, and the U.S. Senate will celebrate the final addition to a complex at Sandia that will produce electronic circuits and computer chips that can withstand high levels of radiation. These “hardened” electronics are critical to national security needs because they assure the reliability of nuclear weapons and other capabilities under even the most hazardous of conditions.
The opening of the new Weapons Integration Facility completes NNSA’s eight-year, $516 million Microsystems and Engineering Sciences Applications (MESA) project. The 400,000-square-foot MESA complex consists of three buildings: the Microelectronics Development Laboratory and MicroFab, the Microsystems Laboratory, and the Weapons Integration Facility. The project is the largest in the history of the lab and was completed three years ahead of schedule and $40 million below budget. To an unprecedented degree, it will combine electronic and optoelectronics fabrication facilities with Sandia’s supercomputing simulations.
A seven-foot tall brass statue of Willis Whitfield, the retired Sandia employee who solved a major problem in making modern microelectronic production possible, will be unveiled during the ceremony. He will be recognized as the engineer that discovered how to remove particles of dust from silicon fabrication facilities, a problem that would cause almost a 50 percent failure rate in the etching of small circuits.