Cryogenics

Cryogenic material property testbed
Large (1 m diameter) cryostat operating to 20 K.
Other test cryostats (various sizes; temperatures down to 4 K)
Cryogenic support equipment (liquid nitrogen and helium, leak detectors etc.)

Labs and clean rooms

13 lab areas (maximum lab height is 6.5 m) including large lab with overhead crane
Can handle equipment up to mass of 10 tonnes
Lab facilities (compressed air, water cooling, chilled water etc.)
US power supply (110 V 60 Hz)
3 flexure rigs; maximum test capacity is 10 tonnes and 3 cubic metres.
4 m x 2 m class 1000 clean room with class 100 laminar flow cabinet, used for electronic device assembly.
6 m x 4 m class 1000 clean room (currently dedicated to one project)
4 m x 4 m tented class 10 000 clean room

Mechanical workshop

CNC and manual mills and lathes
CMM in semi-clean area (used to check part dimensions after manufacture, and also for system alignment). Covers area of 700 mm x 700 mm x 500 mm; resolution approximately 1.5 μm

Mechanical engineering software

Autodesk inventor for mechanical design, with Vault for version control
Thermal and mechanical FEA (finite element analysis) with COSMOS Designstar integrated into Inventor
EdgeCAM (takes Inventor designs and outputs for CAM (computer aided manufature))
"Working model" dynamic mechanical analysis

Electronics

Lexica microscope with TV camera and frame grabber, located in class 1000 clean room
Two complete data acquisition systems for CCD/Infra-red array measurements (32 channels, 1 MHz sampling per channel, SDSU III/ARC controllers)
Full scanning monochromater (used for absolute quantum efficiency measurements at optical/IR wavelengths (0.04 to 1.5 μm)
NPL calibrated diodes for calibrating optical CCD detectors
Test cryostats for IR detector characterization (cooled to 45 K using closed cycle coolers)
JHK band filters (1 to 2.5 μm)
Fe55 X-ray source (used to measure charge transfer efficiency of CCDs)
Calibrated 4 inch square black body source
Full FPGA design environment (Altera devices)
Software: Protel for schematic capture, PSPICE

Optics

6 large optical benches
Three portable fully phase shifting optical interferometers (used to measure flatness etc.) - up to 100 mm beam diameter
Perkin Elmer spectrophotometer (0.4 - 3 μm) (used for measuring filter transmission etc.)
2 alignment telescopes
TM5100A theodolite
Cooled CCD camera