The Gilead Sciences project in Foster City, Calif. involved the design and new construction of a four (4)-story, 200,000 square-foot office building with R&D lab, bio lab and office space. The new building includes specialty formulation rooms and downflow booths built to ISO 5 Certified Class 100 operating standards. Explosion-proof receptacles were coordinated and installed in stainless steel panels designed to minimize bacterial growth and provide for easy cleaning. For the lab space, Cupertino Electric prefabricated and installed 3,400 feet of custom wire mold. Cupertino also coordinated and provided power to tablet coating machines, walk-in refrigeration units, and a human-to-machine interface (HMI) dispensary carousel.
Cupertino Electric’s scope of work at Gilead also included fire alarm, smoke control, and spill notification systems with hallway pull stations throughout the building and main control panels in the fire alarm room. Additional systems installed included grounding and low voltage tray for the data and security systems installed by others. Cupertino Electric also installed a 1500 kW generator with three (3) separate ATS’s to distinguish between back-up, required or life safety emergency power. A 360 kW Uninterruptable Power Supply (UPS) was installed for the IDF rooms and other sensitive pieces of equipment Gilead installed in the new building.
Designed for Unique Site Conditions
The building is constructed on auger cast piles extending down 130 feet, which required additional coordination for our underground electrical infrastructure. A fully-deployed 3D BIM model of the project helped with trade coordination and difficult installations in ceilings that varied greatly in height due to Gilead’s specialty equipment. The entire design lifecycle was about 14 months.
