Clean Acres stakeholders had a unique opportunity to go inside one of the most advanced buildings in California on December 14th. The Clean Acres tour of Seagate's Fremont Research Center highlighted the latest in building controls, advanced research and development, and flexible lab space.

"It is incredible the amount of technology in the guts of this building Seagate implemented to make sure all facility efficiencies are realized," said Sarah Johnson of Duke Energy. "To be able to build out this facility and track every single valve, on any piece of the building operating system via an iPhone, is cool to see in modern manufacturing facilities."

The location also adds credence to the value of high-skilled jobs in the Bay Area economy. As Kelly Kline of the City of Fremont stated, "Seagate’s R&D team in Fremont is underscores 'advanced' in Advanced Industries with 43 PhD’s on site, and 60% of the workforce having a graduate degree or higher."

Semiconductor veteran and CTC Ambassador Don Pacholec added historical context this way: "Amazing to learn that 43 exabytes of data are stored on Seagate drives (five exabytes equals all words estimated to have ever been spoken by human beings). All of this performed on magnetic media using the latest in nanotechnology with defects measured at the nanometer size and the distance from the media to the read write head measured in angstroms. Incredible improvements in storage density and reliability from a world class team. For a point of reference, back in the 1980’s 8 inch floppy disks had a capacity of 80 kilobytes!"

For more on the tour, please visit CTC's Gallery HERE.

For more on the Clean Acres Initiative, please CLICK HERE.