New Berkeley Building Makes Room for Commercializing Technology Research

New Berkeley Building Makes Room for Commercializing Technology Research

Written By Lawrence Biemiller
Monday, March 2, 2009

A new seven-story, $127-million building at the University of California at Berkeley houses an interdisciplinary technology institute intended to commercialize the findings of researchers on four University of California system campuses. The building, Sutardja Dai Hall, had its formal opening Friday.

The 141,000-square-foot building, designed by SmithGroup, mixes research space with collaboration areas, offices, and conference rooms. In addition, the building houses two 15,000-square-foot "clean rooms" for manufacturing microchips "at resolutions 100,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair," the university says. To keep vibration levels down, the nanofabrication labs sit on concrete slabs 39 inches thick. The building also has a main-floor technology museum, a cybercafe, and a 149-seat auditorium.

The building will serve as the home of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society, or Citrus, which brings industrial partners together with researchers from the university system's Berkeley, Davis, Merced, and Santa Cruz campuses.