While walking through the lobby of Electrical Engineering West, have you ever wondered why men in white hospital robes with paper hair nets and booties peer into large machines that seem to mix paint or fabricate bizarre instruments for secret agents?

For Jeff Engle (freshman-liberal arts), the room resembles the lab where James Bond's men develop weapons for 007 watches and the spy's Austin Martin.

Filled with microscopes, swivel chairs, computers with red lights and green digital numbers and men caught in cycles of peering into machines, adjusting knobs and jotting down figures, the room is really a multi-purpose laboratory which produces and tests materials for electronic devices.

Eight divided panes of glass frame the area which is the second phase of the College of Engineering's Center for Electronic Materials and Processing. The people inside are actually researchers -- mainly graduate students and faculty -- who receive funding for various research projects focusing on the engineering of electronic and optoelectronic materials, said D. L. Miller, professor of electrical engineering. Miller oversees some of the graduate work in the center.

The garb the researchers wear, called "bunny suits," is needed due to the importance of creating a carefully controlled, completely dust-free environment, said H. David Sarge, manager of the center.

"The suits are designed to protect the processes from the people," Sarge said.

Director of the Center S. J. Fonash explained that the microelectronics used by the researchers usually are smaller than a bacteria cell. Therefore, this "clean room" environment is essential to the research because one dust particle can disrupt the processes, Fonash said.

The atmosphere created at the center is "the same environment (the student researchers) will work in when they enter the industry," Fonash said, calling the center one of the leading facilities in the east.

This laboratory is the second part of the University's program to develop a three-phase center for electronic materials and processing on campus. The first is located in Hammond Building and focuses on ion processing. Construction of the third phase, which will feature an undergraduate lab, will begin once the funding is appropriated.

"It looks like they're mixing paint in that machine," observed Victoria Rash (senior-logistics) as she sat outside of the center looking at the large instrument with scope-like appendages sticking out in every imaginable direction.

Rash was looking at the Molecular Beam Epitaxy -- a machine used for growing a thin layer of compound semiconductors. These semiconductors are used to make fast, integrated circuits for switches in advanced electronic and optoelectronic devices such as supercomputers.

Essentially the center's researchers are developing better, faster, next generation materials, Sarge said.

But some students, like Scott Peterson (non-degree) and Becky Stevens (junior-economics), have their own interpretation of the center's activities.

"(The researchers) could be working on isolating the gene that breeds the humorous thought of going to college," Peterson said.