Maintaining complex equipment is not the only thing needed to run a modern research facility. Researchers must finish training, get access, plan and run equipment, deal with billing, and more. Coordinating these operations across thousands of users and hundreds of instruments can be a big task for large, shared facilities. Finding the correct capability in the first place is becoming more difficult as research gets more interdisciplinary.
A major focus of the 2026 NEMO User Meeting, which was organized by nano on October 5–6, was addressing these issues. Facility directors, laboratory managers, technical personnel, software developers, industry representatives, and government researchers were among the 65 individuals from 25 laboratories and organizations that attended the meeting. The seminar, which was organized by the Northeast Microelectronics Coalition (NEMC) hub, was centered on exchanging lab management strategies and fostering relationships across facilities.
The NanoFab Equipment Management and Operations (NEMO) system, an open-source platform that offers tools for managing shared research facilities while enabling individual laboratories to customize the system to their own needs, was the focal point of the workshop. The gathering brought to light a crucial aspect of the NEMO community: A wide range of facilities can be served by the same platform, and although the facilities’ sizes and scientific goals may vary, their fundamental operating difficulties are frequently strikingly similar.
One of the most appealing features of NEMO, according to Anna Osherov, associate director of Characterization.nano and meeting organizer, is the collaborative model.
According to her, “open source changes the way we think about technology development.” “Together, we can create a platform that is more capable than what any one facility could develop on its own, build on what others have already developed, and contribute improvements back to the community.”
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) first made NEMO available as open-source software in 2018. Launched in 2023, its community edition (NEMO-CE) enables facilities to create and distribute platform extensions. Participants from Stanford, Columbia, and Princeton universities, the University of Pennsylvania, NIST, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Atlantis Labs presented tools at the October meeting to address issues ranging from equipment status, training, and workflow automation to chemical management and user administration.
The variety of presentations demonstrated how variously designed facilities are customizing a shared platform to meet their specific requirements. For instance, Columbia described their experience moving to NEMO and expanding the system for billing and facility procedures, while Stanford demonstrated real-time displays for reservations and equipment condition. The University of Pennsylvania offered methods for chemical management, and Princeton showed computerized process charts for tracking tool performance.
All things considered, the initiatives illustrated the NEMO community’s guiding principle: a solution created to solve an issue at one site can serve as a resource for others.
“When we work together, we can accomplish far more than when we work alone,” stated director Vladimir Bulović.Nano, in his introductory speech. “NEMO is the platform that finally provided us with an efficient method to do so.”
From Discrete Facilities To An Interconnected Ecosystem Of Research
Another possibility arises as the NEMO community expands. Specific facilities run by universities and research organizations each have specific tools, knowledge, and capacities. However, researchers cannot make advantage of a skill that they are not aware of or find difficult to locate.
This is especially crucial for R&D in microelectronics, where advancement frequently relies on switching between specialized skills quickly. A researcher might require advanced characterisation at one location, fabrication at another, specialist microscopy at a third, and a procedure or analysis capacity that is only accessible at a few institutions.
Locating those capabilities and determining when and where they are available might become a bottleneck in and of itself. Static webpages or databases have historically been used by networks of facilities to describe the resources that are available. However, this information can quickly become out of date when facilities change.
During the meeting, nano introduced Hydra, a new open-source platform being developed with NEMC support as a crucial part of the NEMC Technical Concierge program, which intends to assist researchers in locating and utilizing specialized capabilities across a network of facilities. Instead of requiring someone to manually update a separate database, Hydra is designed to connect several NEMO installations and pull data straight from the systems that facilities already utilize. The end product is a compilation based on the fundamental principles of facility management systems that are currently in use. Osherov clarified, “Hydra does not replace any lab management system.” “It connects, synchronizes, and updates data in real time across all connected systems.”
In this paradigm, Hydra makes information discoverable across facilities, whereas NEMO serves as the operational source of information within a single facility.
For a researcher, that would entail locating a particular capability without first having to determine which lab might own the necessary equipment.
According to Osherov, “the goal is to make the distributed infrastructure supporting research more discoverable and usable.”
Constructing Adaptable Infrastructure
The strategy is in line with a more general idea that research infrastructure must adapt as research itself does. According to Bulović, “we need to build a flexible research space and a community-oriented space so that people feel empowered to go to it, use it, and then redefine it as the years progress, adapting it to the needs of the next generation of researchers.”
Both operating systems and actual laboratories are subject to this adaptability. Facilities create new needs, user communities evolve, and new tools and research techniques appear. An open-source platform facilitates the sharing of improvements while enabling specific facilities to adapt to those changes.
With over 160,000 hours of tool usage annually, NEMO supports over 1,600 active researchers at nano alone, utilizing over 200 tools. Operating at that scale, according to Jorg Scholvin, associate director of Fab.nano, makes the effectiveness of routine procedures and the capacity for rapid adaptation and change crucial.
“Thousands of users and tens of thousands of equipment interactions can multiply a small improvement in an administrative workflow,” he stated.
The Wave Of NEMO
Throughout the two days of the meeting, there was a strong sense of camaraderie and optimism about the future of shared facilities. The final talks focused on the future of automation, artificial intelligence, and data integration in laboratory operations.
The CEO and co-founder of Atlantis Labs, Mathieu Rampant, described a concept where facility managers may exchange ideas and work together to address problems as “the community is taking on a life of its own.” “It’s more sustainable,” he continued, discussing how the facilities managers are communicating with one another, exchanging ideas and resolving issues as a network. Samantha Roberts, director of the City University of New York nanofabrication facility, referred to this as “the NEMO wave.” Everyone cares about it and has a stake in it. Changing your lab management system is a lot of work, but if we persevere, we can create something truly amazing and functional.
The goal is still clear to Osherov.
In the end, this is about making research possible. The more efficiently we can make our tools, knowledge, and skills available to the research community, the better we can manage the operational aspect of our facilities.
This availability is important in microelectronics, where innovation is becoming more and more dependent on access to distributed and specialized capabilities. Researchers can go from a hypothesis to an experiment to real-world application and impact more quickly if they can identify the appropriate capability at the correct facility utilizing data taken straight from systems that are now in use.