Solid-state battery production cleanroom
Square Feet
The Angstrom Group delivered a new 3,600 square foot cleanroom facility for R&D at a solid-state battery manufacturing facility. Delivered from order to handover in just 6 months, this cleanroom was built between February and August 2021. This schedule was achieved, despite COVID-19 restrictions and disruption, through high levels of communication and collaboration.
- Designed and built in 6 months – from order to handover
- 8 zones – process-built layout with 3 process areas and 5 ancillary zones
- Zones achieve ISO classes 6-8, plus 20±1°C and 45%RH±10%RH in all classified areas
- Construction was undertaken during the COVID-19 pandemic
- Daily project management meetings and weekly steering group meetings with a multi-disciplinary team
- The Site Project Lead, gave weekly tours to the CEO, CFO, and CSO — to keep senior management up to date on the progress at the site
- Eight zones provide segregated spaces for various process activities — three main process areas and five ancillary zones.
These batteries are created on the surface of a wafer by layering semiconductive materials in intricate patterns. Each layer is part of a step and it takes over 60 steps to achieve the exact electrochemistry. Batteries needs to move back and forth between the zones, so an optimised layout was critical to achieving people and product transfer.
You enter the cleanrooms through an ISO class 8 changing room into the ISO class 7 dry etching zone. There are then three routes. Either progress into the ISO class 8 chase zone, the ISO class 6 photolithography (wet etching) zone, or through the ISO class 7 tool 1 processing zone into the ISO class 8 semi cleanroom. From the semi cleanroom, you can access the unclassified corridor and cleaning room. Some machinery crosses zones and so apertures were created to profile walls around the specialist equipment.