Each year, UC Santa Barbara’s open-access Nanofabrication Facility, known as the Nanofab, brings in more than five hundred users to its “makerspace” for microchips, where academic researchers, industry scientists, and students alike can design and build microchips — important components of everything from cutting-edge quantum communications research to potential tools for repairing bone with biomaterials.

But once they’ve got their microchip, what do they do next?

Enter UCSB’s new prototyping facility, known as the Protofab, based at the OASIS research and development hub in Goleta. This month, a range of prototyping equipment — including tools for automatic wire bonding, plasma cleaning, and 3D package inspection — is opening for research use, with additional equipment for microoptics and photonics packaging available soon.. The facility offers more than four thousand square feet of space for users to package their chips and make prototypes — a step long considered a bottleneck in research and development, said Brian Thibeault, Nanofab’s technical and operational director. “We believe this facility will really expand innovation.”

"Protofab bridges a critical gap faced by both startups and established players in research and industry," said Umesh Mishra, dean of The Robert Mehrabian College of Engineering. "The ability to package emerging technology will broaden the positive impact of OASIS and enable the process of turning innovative new tools into real-world solutions at speed and at affordable cost."

Once researchers build a microchip at the Nanofab, they need to package their microchips to incorporate them into testable systems. For example, UCSB electrical and computer engineering professor Daniel Blumenthal has scaled large lasers and optical equipment down to the size of a chip, and has spent years building his group’s in-house photonics packaging capability to couple these chips with the lasers and housing to make them useful, robust, and portable devices. 

In addition, the startups and companies using the Nanofab to make advanced electronics also need to be able to package their chips both to show investors a finished product, and then to make their product available and useful at a larger scale. Smaller businesses, in particular, may be at the mercy of outside vendors to do the packaging, meaning that they have little control over the quality and timing of this often-expensive process. 

With the new prototyping facility, Thibeault said, “this process is open and available for people to come in and use their own hands, on their own time schedule, to get trained on how to do packaging and advanced integration, with expert support and guidance.” This spring, a direct fiber-optic network connection linked the prototyping facility with the Nanofab, shrinking the two-mile distance between the facilities and making processes like equipment signup identical, he added. “Our prototyping facility is coupled and closely connected with the Nanofab, so that the researchers and companies that build advanced electronics on campus will have a seamless experience as they move into packaging.” 

Earlier this spring, the Protofab team, led by facility manager Arin Abed, installed electrostatic dissipating flooring and a Class 10,000 modular cleanroom for the packaging lab to protect sensitive components and parts. Moving into summer, the team began adding additional equipment, such as an automated wire bonder with integrated pull/shear test (shown in the image above); epoxy dispense/cure and plasma clean stations; and a digital confocal microscope that allows users to perform high-resolution optical inspection, and to measure, characterize, and document their micro- and opto-electronic devices and components.

By fall 2026, the Protofab will have installed a high-precision motorized/programmable die bonder that places components with sub-micron accuracy, and an automatic fiber-alignment, bonding and test system for photonic integrated circuits.

One major addition will be a 3D rapid nanoprinting system based on two-photon photolithography system for photonic wirebonds and optical microlens packaging techniques. The tool was secured with the help of a $1.15 million National Science Foundation grant by UCSB professor of electrical and computer engineering Galan Moody and four co-PIs — Marley Dewey (Bioengineering), Andrew Jayich (Physics), Sumita Pennathur (Mechanical Engineering), and Andrea Young (Physics). With this equipment, Moody and his colleagues will be able to conduct research in quantum photonics, biomaterials, and fluid analysis, among other pursuits. Thibeault noted that, with the new nanoprinting system, “you can quite literally connect two microchips with light.”  

Protofab received its initial funding through Uplift Central Coast’s Catalyst Program, a regional economic development grant. The prototyping facility is one of many areas that the university is readying as part of the OASIS facility, which will also have wet lab space for incubator companies and other resources that small companies can use as part of their research endeavors. This public-private partnership is what has allowed the Nanofab to be sustainable, Thibeault said. “This model is becoming more and more important at the university.”