Clean Room Facilities

Our dedicated clean room for the fabrication of organic devices was funded by a grant from the Wolfson Foundation. The basic clean room is class 10,000 and houses a general working area for device preparation and an Edwards 306 automatic metal evaporator.

For the critical process of thin film spinning we have one spinner located in a class 100 chemi-wet station. This very clean area is used for all solution handling as well as spinning to minimise particulate contamination of both solutions and films before they dry.

We also have our large glove box housed within the clean room. A new metal evaporator (with turbo pump) has recently been built into the glove box. A second spinner is also kept in the glove box so that we can fabricate polymer LEDs completely in the glove box environment.

A current research project is looking into the differences in device performance between devices made in the glove box and those made in the open clean room. We hope shortly to add another evaporator so that we can deposit non-metallic layers to aid our studies into the origins of photoconductivity in polymer films.