News

National Scalable Atomic Processing Line (SAP-NL) consortium project led by Sten Vollebregt gets funded

• Wednesday, 30 April 2025

Dr.ir. Sten Vollebregt, of TU Delft's Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, has received a substantial grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) for his consortium project National Scalable Atomic Processing Line (SAP-NL). The project aims to develop a national facility for large-scale atomic fabrication. As part of the call ‘Research infrastructure: national consortia (RI:NC)’, NWO is investing over 21 million euros in projects for innovative scientific infrastructure.

National facility for scalable atomic fabrication

Materials innovation is essential in solving our society's challenges, such as energy transition and further digitalization. Think about developing faster and more energy-efficient chips, better batteries, solar panels and communication networks. “We are at the point where we can build materials atom layer by atom layer,” explains Associate Professor dr.ir. Sten Vollebregt. This results in materials with properties specifically tailored to the application or that do not occur in nature.

“The materials we focus on are 2D materials, thin-film wide-bandgap semiconductors, and heterojunctions of these materials,” explains Sten. The fabrication of these materials must be done under a protected environment because surface contamination degrades material properties. Therefore, the goal of this project is to establish a national infrastructure for atomic fabrication that makes this possible AND in an industrially scalable manner. “As far as we know, this facility is unique in the world,” Sten enthuses. “After its realization, the infrastructure will become part of  NanoLabNL.”