Cleanroom Glove Packaging. Not all gloves are packed equal

Is your glove packaged in a dispenser box? Is it labeled ‘examination glove’ ?

If so, it is not suitable for a critical environment. Why? Boxed exam gloves are designed to protect the operator. Cleanroom Gloves are engineered to both protect the operator and your critical product.

 

Controlled environment gloves are flat packaged in a critical environment with the cuffs all to one end in two stacks of 50 each, double poly-bagged 100 per pack, 10 packs per case in a carton liner to ensure product integrity. Boxed gloves are not.

Over 98% of thin-wall, powder-free gloves are used in medical / lab / industrial applications. Operators of controlled environments often unknowingly procure a glove not designed to their application. Powder-free lab / industrial / medical grade boxed gloves are not suitable for a controlled environment because:

• Boxed gloves are powder-free, not particulate-free. Uncoated chipboard dispenser boxes shed particles, and contaminate the powder-free gloves.
• Dispenser boxes force operators to contaminate glove when donning. Operators’ bare hand should only make cuff contact.
• Additives and fillers are often used in boxed gloves which reduce ESD compatibility (surface resistivity), and negatively impact glove cleanliness.
• No post-processing to reduce surface contamination left from the dipping process

Engineered to protect your Product, Process & Operator

Valutek’s gloves are packed in double poly bags, vacuum sealed, flat packed in carton boxes and with a carton liner. All gloves are critical environment compatible, lot traceable with retention samples held in quality control for 36 months from date of manufacturing.

Vacuum seal benefit: better storage, no particulate release, no ESD issue

 

IBM: What Makes This Tiny Chip a Breakthrough

IBM showed off a prototype chip today that is being hailed as a technological breakthrough for the tiny transistors — electrical switches that help power a computer — that have been made so thin they’re 1/10,000th the width of a human hair.

The breakthrough — the result of research at IBM and the State University of New York Polytechnic Institute in Albany — could allow as many as 20 billion transistors to be placed on a chip the size of a fingernail and is half the size of the current 14 nanometer standard, company officials said. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter.

While the technology is a prototype chip, it could have a tremendous impact “on the anticipated demands of future cloud computing and Big Data systems, cognitive computing, mobile products and other emerging technologies,” according to the company.

Moore’s Law: What’s in Store For the Next 50 Years of Computing Power

The breakthrough chip is the result of a $3 billion investment IBM made last year in partnership with the state of New York, Samsung and other technology suppliers for the purpose of chip research and design, officials said.

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How to Save the Troubled Graphene Transistor

Unlike conventional semiconductors, graphene cannot be switched off, a problem that threatens to scupper its use in future generations of transistors. Now physicists think they’ve found a solution.

The writing is on the wall for the silicon chip. Transistors have been shrinking for the last half a century but they cannot get smaller forever. Most industry pundits think that the downscaling of silicon chip technology cannot extend much beyond 2026. The big question, of course, is what will replace it.

One possibility is graphene, which various teams around the world have used to make hugely fast transistors. Last year, one team clocked a graphene transistor at a cool 427 GHz. So you could be forgiven for thinking that graphene is the perfect silicon replacement.

Not so fast. There is a significant problem with graphene that makes it difficult to use in transistors– it has no band gap.

That means there is no energy range in graphene in which electron states cannot exist. Or in other words, it’s impossible to switch off graphene. And for a transistor, that spells serious trouble…

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Jet Propulsion Laboratory Missions to Study Climate Change & Weather on Earth

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is known for its exploration of space, but the La Cañada Flintridge facility is starting to focus its gaze back to Earth. Three new missions scheduled to launch in 2014 will examine soil moisture, wind, and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The data obtained from the orbiters sent on these missions can be used by farmers, meteorologists and others in understanding how the planet works, scientists said. “Last year was the year of Mars,” said JPL Director Charles Elachi on Tuesday. “This is the year of Earth science.” Elachi and NASA Administrator Charles Bolden donned white coveralls and head coverings Tuesday during a tour of a chamber in JPL’s spacecraft assembly facility, also known as the “clean room,” where instruments for the missions are currently being assembled and tested. The Carbon Observatory-2 satellite was absent from the test facility, but talk of the upcoming mission led to discussions about how the agency will address the changing global climate…

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SUNY’s College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE) Transforms Kodak Cleanroom

SUNY’s College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE) will revitalize a vacant Kodak cleanroom building in Rochester, N.Y., by transforming it into a first-of-its-kind CNSE Photovoltaic Manufacturing and Technology Development Facility for crystalline silicon photovoltaics. Renovation is underway to transform the 57,000 ft2 building, which was formerly occupied by Kodak’s MEMS inkjet facility before it closed last October. The initiative will enable more than 100 high-tech jobs and includes the fitting up of a 20,000-square ft2 cleanroom. A late fall opening is anticipated. The first initiative as part of the project will relocate a critical component of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) SunShot initiative from California’s Silicon Valley to Upstate New York…

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Satellite Built by UAH Students ’99 Percent’ Ready for October Launch on NASA Rocket

The spacecraft conceived and built in Huntsville is virtually ready for launch and blast-off is less than three months away.

No, the Space Launch System is not suddenly on an accelerated program. Instead, it’s a group of students at the University of Alabama in Huntsville who have been working for more than three years on a tiny satellite that is scheduled to be sent into space in October.

Members of the Space Hardware Club at UAH were in San Luis Obispo, Calif., last week on the campus of California Polytechnic State University. The Cal Poly visit was to put the ChargerSat1 through readiness tests as a final hurdle toward the scheduled Oct. 30 launch.

The satellite got a “good thumbs-up,” according to team member Mark Becnel.

“We’re well past 99 percent (ready),” he said.

The project began in 2010 when the club applied for a spot on a future NASA launch…

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Stretchable Conductor Grows Its Own Wires

Networks of spherical nanoparticles embedded in elastic materials may make the best stretchy conductors yet, engineering researchers at the University of Michigan have discovered.

Flexible electronics have a wide variety of possibilities, from bendable displays and batteries to medical implants that move with the body.

“Essentially the new nanoparticle materials behave as elastic metals,” said Nicholas Kotov, the Joseph B. and Florence V. Cejka Professor of Engineering. “It’s just the start of a new family of materials that can be made from a large variety of nanoparticles for a wide range of applications.”

Finding good conductors that still work when pulled to twice their length is a tall order—researchers have tried wires in tortuous zigzag or spring-like patterns, liquid metals, nanowire networks and more…

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Paper-Thin E-Skin Responds to Touch

A new milestone by engineers at UC Berkeley can help robots become more touchy-feely, literally.

A research team led by Ali Javey, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences, has created the first user-interactive sensor network on flexible plastic. The new electronic skin, or e-skin, responds to touch by instantly lighting up. The more intense the pressure, the brighter the light it emits.

“We are not just making devices; we are building systems,” says Javey, who also has an appointment as a faculty scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). “With the interactive e-skin, we have demonstrated an elegant system on plastic that can be wrapped around different objects to enable a new form of human-machine interfacing…

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Robot Automated Transportation for Cleanrooms Revealed

Ortner, a factory automation specialist, and its partner MetraLabs Automation, a provider of freely navigating autonomous mobile robots, have introduced their jointly-developed mobile robot, SCOUT at SEMICON West.

SCOUT has been specially developed for the flexible and automated transportation of materials in semiconductor fabs and other clean production environments.

SCOUT navigates autonomously, without any kind of guidance system and communicates via WiFi and operator GUI to issue new transport jobs and show important status information like its current position. The robot is cleanroom suitable up to ISO class 3 / US FED class 1 and has more than 5,000 km of autonomous navigation in clean rooms, which proves its reliability.

Thanks to its compact size and reliable sensor technology, SCOUT can be used safely in areas where people and machines work closely together,” explains Matthias Merten, CEO of MetraLabs Automation, Inc. “This makes SCOUT an ideal alternative in cases where a permanently installed transport system such as a rail or a conveyor system cannot be implemented or would be too expensive…

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Space For All: Small, Cheap Satellites May One Day Do Your Bidding

Someday, swarms of satellites the size of a tissue box will be snapping pictures, taking environmental readings and broadcasting messages from orbit — but the entities controlling those satellites won’t be governments. Instead, they’ll be hard-core hobbyists and elementary-school students, entrepreneurs and hacktivists. In short, anyone who can afford a few hundred dollars to send something to the final frontier. The technology for this outer-space revolution already exists: It’s a type of satellite known as a CubeSat, which measures just 4 inches (10 centimeters) on a side. The CubeSat phenomenon started out as an educational experiment, but now it’s turning into a crowdsourcing, crowdfunding movement of Kickstarter proportions. And not even the sky is the limit…

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