About the Facility

The Silanna Group was founded in 2006 and is Australia’s only semiconductor design and manufacturing company.

With its head office in Brisbane and additional operational, manufacturing and design centres in Sydney, USA, UK and Singapore, Silanna supplies high-technology microelectronic chips to the global communications, space, defence and medical markets.

The company’s silicon-on-sapphire radio-frequency antenna switch, for example, is used extensively in smart phones and space satellites, and in NASA's Mars rovers.

Inside the Silanna picoFAB Facility at the University of Adelaide

Inside the Silanna picoFAB Facility at the University of Adelaide

International flagship ‘clean room’

The picoFAB has been collaboratively designed by Silanna and the University of Adelaide to support Silanna’s advanced compound semiconductor research program.

At the heart is a remarkable piece of technology: a molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) semiconductor manufacturing tool. Custom-built by Veeco Instruments, this cutting-edge tool consists of three ultra-high-vacuum deposition chambers, each designed to grow crystalline materials at the quantum scale.