The Advanced Micro/nanosystems Integration Facility at the University of Calgary (AMIF) was established to support the integration and post-processing of advanced Microsystems and nanotechnologies into practical devices for a broad range of end applications. AMIF targets a capability gap in Alberta’s infrastructure: leveraging the design capabilities of the Universities and the fabrication capabilities of nanoFab and adding value by integrating technologies and developing prototypes, and post-fabrication processes such as RF MEMS deposition and packaging. These services are directly aligned with the Province of Alberta’s Nanostrategy, in which AMIF is identified as a “key facility”. 

MNT facilities such as AMIF are rapidly becoming the high-tech machine shops of micro- and nanotechnology innovations. As every hardware manufacturing company would expect to have access to, for example, expertise in metalwork, electronics, or plastics manufacture, so too MNT innovations increasingly require access to standard MNT processes and toolsets such as flip-chip bonding, micro-patterning, or photolithography. As yet, however, the tools and facilities that underpin these technologies represent a major barrier to entry for new Small Businesses and a significant impediment to the research teams whose innovations will fuel the MNT market sector. AMIF is specifically positioned to address low-volume, specialised R&D and prototyping needs for this community and to promote promising technologies and innovations to organisations such as ACAMP that are placed to help nurture them into full productisation.

AMIF is located in the Calgary Centre for Innovative Technology and is a unique facility in Western Canada, establishing complementary capabilities to those offered by CMC Microsystems and allowing us to refine and integrate fabricated designs. Together with CMC and Alberta's other micro- and nano-systems infrastracture, AMIF will support not only these biomedical initiatives but also Alberta's technology vision and offer one of the most advanced, University based, integration and fabrication post processing facilities world wide.

The AMIF facility has been designed in two parts: a highly controlled Class 100 environment that contains critical fabrication and integration equipment such as our flip-chip bonder, double sided mask aligner and thin film measurement systems and so on, and a larger Class 1000 facility which houses a femtosecond laser micromachining system, E-beam machine, plasma chemical vapour deposition system and a variety of advanced thin-film deposition and profilometry equipment. The two rooms are co-located with a connecting door and require identical protective clothing, facilitating free movement between the rooms.

AMIF is supported by the Province of Alberta and the Schulich School of Engineering.