The NISRC is a centre of excellence for research and development in silicon technology, thin film technology and novel device structures. The facility offers support through technology transfer, training and collaborative enterprise to industry in new growth areas.

The Centre has a complete silicon processing suite suitable for the fabrication of 0.8 mm CMOS integrated circuits on 100mm diameter substrates and limited capability on 150mm wafers. For thin film work there is a wide range of PVD systems including dc and rf magnetron sputtering and EB evaporation. The Centre is set up as a versatile research laboratory rather than a dedicated IC production facility. This enables it to respond to an increasingly wide range of industrial needs.

The Centre has been at the forefront of direct silicon wafer bonding technology for the fabrication of silicon on insulator substrates (SOI) and was able to assist a start-up company for SOI substrates to become established. The Centre has also considerable expertise in Chemical Vapour Deposition of insulators, semiconductors and metals. This ranges from the deposition of polycrystalline silicon on glass for thin film transistor circuits to epitaxial growth of Si,Ge, for silicon HBTs.

The NISRC has recently entered the world of Nanotechnology forming part of the new £11 million Nanotech NI project in collaboration with Chemistry and Physics within QUB and the Nanotechnology Research Institute based at the University of Ulster  Jordanstown. Employing state of the art technology such as E-beam Lithography, Atomic Layer Deposition(ALD), the centre aims to fabricate nanoscale devices and Nano Electro-Mechanical Systems.(NEMS).