A note from Dr Ian Griffiths, ANFF CEO

The Australian National Fabrication Facility (ANFF) has made a number of investments in world class infrastructure and engineering to support key industry sectors outlined by Scott Morrison during today’s pre-budget address.

The Prime Minister’s announcement today has outlined an innovative budget focused on advanced manufacturing that will lay foundations for new technologies, jobs, and businesses to flourish in Australia.

It’s encouraging to us that ANFF strategy is strongly aligned with industry sectors that have been identified as critical importance to ‘rebuilding our economy’. We strongly encourage Australian businesses to engage with ANFF to assist in advancing innovative manufacturing for high value products.

Scott Morrison’s identification of resources and critical minerals, food and beverage, medical products, recycling and clean energy, defence, and space as key sectors for the future reassures ANFF that our recent strategic investments in research infrastructure have, as planned, been directed in a fashion that best serves the Australian taxpayer.

The past few months has seen a number of investment decisions that will be benefitting those working in these key sectors in the very near future. New essential equipment is arriving into ANFF’s network that will add to the $500 million already invested in Australia’s advanced manufacturing and fabrication capability.

• We’re providing access to brand new laser processing equipment, secured specifically to build high fidelity biomedical components and address future needs in the Medtech sector.
• Advanced technologies are being provided to create novel optical structures in the fibres used for sensing and communications applications. These capabilities are required to further refine state of the art fibre-optics / photonics technology for defence communications and for use in space.
• Upgrades to characterisation equipment will be provided to support our unique Silicon Carbide (SiC) wafer work. SiC’s use in energy storage and for high-power electric vehicle recharging is incredibly promising, the quality product produced by the ANFF team is unique in Australia and will enable new classes of green technologies to be developed in the near future.
• We are investing in the fibre processing capabilities to enable spinning of novel fibre constructs. ANFF clients have recently used our advanced fibre suites to produce flexible capacitors that could revolutionise electronic devices in space, in defence and in medical applications.
• And we’re adding new equipment and expertise to our offering in Sydney that will help to build the budding quantum industry that has grown off the back of ANFF-enabled research excellence.

But the thing that matters more than our extensive and expanding equipment portfolio is ANFF’s in-house expertise. There’s no-where else in Australia that you’ll find a focal point of advanced manufacturing know-how.

It’s by arming Australia’s innovators with access to suites of world-class infrastructure and skills that we at ANFF will be supporting this new strategy, we have been doing it for over a decade and it’s what we do better than anyone else in the world.