Tidal Chip Lab Adds a Clean Room for Edge Devices
The expansion keeps prototype packaging local instead of shipping every board to a distant foundry partner.
Tidal Chip Lab cut the ribbon on a modest clean room dedicated to packaging and testing edge devices, aiming to keep early hardware spins inside the region.
The room is 1,850 square feet, rated ISO Class 7, and occupies what used to be the dry-goods bay of a 1948 chandlery on Warp Street. The bay’s original freight door is still there, painted over and sealed behind the gowning vestibule. Inside are two die-attach stations, a wire bonder, a reflow oven, and an environmental chamber that can hold minus forty to plus one hundred twenty-five degrees Celsius - the automotive-grade range, which the lab does not need yet and bought anyway.
The lab has long designed low-power boards for environmental sensors. Packaging, however, often meant weeks of shipping and customs. “Iteration died in transit,” said founder Amari Nunez.
Nunez has a number for it. Over the past three years the lab’s median turnaround from a finished design to a testable packaged part was 41 days, of which 9 were actual work and the rest were freight, customs holds, and queue time at a partner facility that reasonably prioritized customers ordering fifty thousand units rather than sixty. The internal target for the new room is six days. The first run, a batch of 240 flood-gauge modules completed on January 12, took eleven.
State manufacturing grants covered roughly forty percent of the fit-out.
The total fit-out came to $3.4 million, of which the state’s coastal manufacturing program contributed $1.38 million under a five-year clawback agreement tied to headcount. The lab must hold at least 34 full-time positions - it currently has 29, up from 21 a year ago - by the end of 2028, or repay on a sliding scale.
The rest came from a revenue-share agreement with a consortium of municipal customers who want faster repairs on flood and air sensors. Seven jurisdictions signed on, including Port Meridian’s public works department, the county drainage district, and five smaller towns up and down the coast that pooled their contribution. They put in $1.05 million collectively and take 6 percent of the clean room’s third-party revenue until the contribution is returned, after which the share drops to 1.5 percent for four years.
## Why municipalities put money into a private lab
The arrangement raised eyebrows at two of the participating councils. Drainage district commissioner Halvard Bream voted for it and remains uneasy about the precedent.
“We are a special district with taxing authority and we just became a venture investor in a company that sells us things,” Bream said. “I supported it because our gauges fail in a specific way that nobody outside this harbor cares about, and the alternative was waiting three years for a vendor who never showed. But if this goes badly, the lesson people will take is that it was reckless, not that it was necessary.”
The specific failure he means is corrosion at the cable gland on tide gauges installed below the mean high-water line, which the district was replacing at a rate of roughly one in six per year at $1,900 a unit. A redesigned housing packaged in the new room is now in field trial at eleven sites, with a decision point in October.
Nunez is careful about the sales pitch. The clean room will not compete with high-volume Asian lines. It targets batches under a few thousand units - the awkward middle that pure software firms forget exists. “If you need a hundred thousand parts, call somebody with a fab and a Tuesday,” she said. “If you need four hundred parts in a housing nobody has ever built, and you need to change your mind twice, that is us.”
Engineers involved in the rollout described the first ninety days as integration work more than invention. The environmental chamber’s controller shipped with firmware that logged in a proprietary format the lab’s test rig could not parse, costing three weeks. Particle counts in the gowning vestibule ran high until the crew discovered the building’s original freight door was not as sealed as the drawings claimed; a contractor spent two days chasing the leak with a smoke pencil before finding it at a bolt penetration.
Karim Sadeghi, the lab’s process lead, said the harder lesson was cultural. “We hired people who are very good at making one of something,” he said. “A clean room punishes that. The room does not care how clever you are. It cares whether you gowned in the same order as yesterday.”
University engineering students will rotate through as paid interns, a condition of the grant that Nunez said the lab wanted anyway. Twelve slots per year at $24 an hour, split between the fall and spring terms, with a preference in the agreement for students from the state’s two-year technical programs rather than only from the four-year engineering school. Six of the twelve first-cycle interns came from Bayline Community College’s electronics technology program.
The lab has not committed to a second phase. A wafer-level test capability would roughly double the room’s usefulness and cost about $2.2 million, and Nunez says she will not raise for it until the consortium’s contribution is repaid, which the current book of work puts somewhere in early 2029.
On the wall of the vestibule, between the gowning checklist and the pressure gauge, someone has taped a customs declaration from a 2023 shipment - eleven boards, held forty-three days, released without explanation. Nunez says she has been asked twice to take it down. It is still there.
Reporting for this story was prepared for The Harbor Ledger’s technology desk. Tips:newsroom@theharborledger.com