This is how the chips in your computer are made.

[amerikat]

It's a video well worth watching.

It's not to technical and the average person could learn something.

The newest and greatest chip fab facility is under construction
just a few miles from where I live.

1.3 million square feet. 300,000 square feet of clean rooms.

watch the video here. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWVywhzuHnQ

[Canuckistanian]

1. Amazing

I've worked in electronics for over 20 years but I've never seen a silicon cylinder being made. I didn't realize they were over 400 pounds and that large.

[amerikat]

2. and that was a 200mm.....the new standard is 300 mm

progress I guess.

[progressoid]

3. That was a fun tour!

[RC]

4. The First Transistor

[amerikat]

10. was that bell labs?

[RC]

14. Yes it was. December 1947 Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain

[HughMoran]

5. Watched a couple of vids

Pretty cool stuff.

[EFerrari]

6. My mother in law used to work for GTW Lenkurt

and iirc, they made some of the parts for the Pong game and then later, for the Atari games. They're long gone.

[customerserviceguy]

7. The fabs are something amazing

I worked in one a few years ago, it was like no other job I've ever had.

[amerikat]

9. Can you tell me what it was like.

good , bad.............i hesitate to apply for this job.

[customerserviceguy]

15. It's pretty physical

You're on your feet for long hours, since shutting down the machines and starting them up again requires many hours of preparation, they just keep them going for 24/7. That means running 12 hour shifts at the place I worked at, and we worked three days one week, and four the next. Of course, that schedule meant getting a three day weekend one week, and a four day one the next, as well. But as I started after I turned 50, I found myself pretty much resting up from the four day workweek on my three day weekend.

The cleanroom gowns ("bunny suits") are not for the claustrophobic, I had less skin showing than my first grade nun! But it is a temperature and humidity-controlled environment, and that's good. We were treated quite well, the company subsidized a cafeteria that might have been the best restaurant in that part of the county. Also, good benefits, I had health insurance with no out of pocket premium, but I didn't have a family to cover.

It was good to know that I was doing useful work, the wafers inside the pod I was working with might be chips that went in pacemakers that kept someone's ticker going, or they might be in an automobile airbag, waiting to save someone's life in a split second. A lot of jobs are about doing BS things that really don't do any good for anyone except for those making profits from selling overpriced, underperforming junk, I had the knowledge that most of what I was working on didn't fit that criterion.

[amerikat]

18. I've worked in a clean room before.

I hated the bunny suits. But they were part of the job and some days I spent endless hours
in a clean room and other days we could fix the tools from outside the clean room. In the fab
where you worked, did the equipment techs have to be in the clean rooms all the time or
were the pumps and support equipments outside the clean rooms?

Sorry to ask so many questions and I thank you for the answers to my questions.
Not sure if I would like all that time in the bunny suit.

This fab will work 24/7/365 also.

[amerikat]

12. What was your job there?

I'm going for equipment teck....a mechanic job

[customerserviceguy]

16. I moved 'pods' of wafers around

in the Etch department. Worked with machines the size of a Winnebago that removed things from the 'layer cake' that we were building on eight inch silicon wafers. I left that job over three years ago to move to NY to be with my lady, but every time I go back to the Portland, OR area to visit family, I still get together with folks from my old crew.

[hedgehog]

8. This being DU, I was afraid we were going to see a film of child sweat shop workers

making the parts out of ground puppies!

[amerikat]

11. I think these folks are on the level

won't be easy work.....just hope it'll be honest work.

[hedgehog]

13. Nothing wrong with hard work, as long as the pay matches!

[oldlib]

17. The industry has come a long way

since I joined Westinghouse Semiconductor, at Thousand Oaks, California in 1963. It is apparent that they can produce eight inch silicon ingots today. When I joined the group the ingots were about two inches and they were oval and not round. The industry was just starting at that time and we referred to it as "Pulling back the foreskin of science." In the circuit design group that I was in we developed, utilizing slide rules, the equations that are now in the computer design applications.