This video was shot inside a 200mm fab at Intel’s Hudson, Massachusetts factory. This is the fab where some of the first Centrino™ chips were made. The video shows automation levels typical for the late nineties. Note how slow it is. Another thing to note is the extensiveness of the cleanroom bunny suits, necessitated by Ohmi-style open-cassette operations. The idea was to have an ultra-clean room. The garb is much more aggressive than in the video from 1980. This would soon change after this video was made. The widespread introduction of mini-environments in 300mm put wafers in a protective enclosure called a FOUP (Front Opening Universal Pod). The idea was simple: would you send an entire factory into space or put the people in protective suits? In this case, it’s the wafers that need protecting and it’s far more comfortable for the people if they can relax their cleanroom garb. As it turned out, while people were the source of defects from cleanrooms of the seventies and eighties, contamination from mechanisms in the equipment would prove to be far more problematic once the equipment became highly automated.
Copyright © 2003 by Intel. Reproduced with the verbal and implied permission of the Copyright Owner.