Director of Engineering

The main difficulty of the containment building is that there are three levels of experimental production facilities, which are fundamentally different. When desining this building, we changed the shape of the rooms dozens of times, sometimes the partitions were moved by 2 to 3 mm. And here's why.

On the first level, ultra-sensitive sensors are produced. To them, any exposure is crucial, even train vibration within 100 metres of the building or electric wires radiation. The room is therefore shielded from any interference, and all the equipment is installed on vibration-proof foundations with maximum vibration protection class according to NIST criteria (USA).

On the second level there is a production of transport proteins that deliver medicines through the body, for example to tumour cells. The main part of the production is located in class A clean rooms. The purification degree of water, air and process medium complies with the maximum international criteria and far exceeds the purification degree of water for injections.

The third level is dedicated to the production of nanoelectronic components. As an example, there are substrates for processors created by molecular beam epitaxy. More than 80 process mediums are used in the production, including liquid nitrogen, hydrofluoric acid, arsine (the most poisonous of the inorganic gases) and monosilane (lethal and combustible at room temperature).

The total power consumption of the equipment on the third floor is more than 1 Mwatt. By comparison, the same amount is consumed by a very large hypermarket like Lenta or METRO per day.

We have managed to accomodate all the three conflicting production facilities in a small area. This facility is one of the most difficult challenges we have had to face. We now dream of a task that will surpass it.