Slashdot Mirror
Sandia Lab Celebrates Inventor of the Modern Clean Room
coondoggie writes "Sandia National Laboratories physicist Willis Whitfield, 92, passed away earlier this month and left a technological legacy that continues to reverberate today: The legendary clean room. The original laminar-flow 10 x 6 clean room developed 50 years ago by Whitfield was more than 1,000 times cleaner than any cleanrooms used at the time and ultimately revolutionized microelectronics, healthcare and manufacturing development. According to Sandia, with slight modifications, it is still the clean room standard today."
You'll find no Sandia-derived technology in MY house, I can assure you.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Cubits. Probably.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATGrbTN63H4
The article is suggesting that for a while at least, they were the best.
Seems credible, but I'd be interested in hearing about the alternatives.
... is a luxury boutique hotel in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Ah! Those old engineers who actually invented something. Something that in some small ways forms part of the bedrock of our modern society.
I wonder what kind of bedrock our generation is giving to the future. Something tells me that iDinks and Apps are not going to be driving industry in 50 years time.
May the Maths Be with you!
I used to work for a company that made microchip inspection machines and they had a "clean" room. Things go so unclean that everyone in the building had to have a re-education class in clean room even if there was no chance they would ever be in one. It was that bad. People wouldn't wipe their feet, wear masks, hair covers, etc. But what I think really, really pushed management over the edge and require classes for *everyone* was people were not only eating potato chips in there but leaving the wrappers. That, was the last straw.
It's gonna be hard to dig any dirt on him.
Cleanrooms are pretty much dead technology. I work in one of the few large-scale 'real' cleanrooms left (100k+ square feet at class <10), which was built in the mid 90s.
200mm wafers were small enough for people to carry around and material handling robots were less advanced, so it made sense to make the entire fab into laminar-flow cleanroom and have people carry wafers around exposed to the air. This is obviously absurdly expensive, given the square footage of HEPA filters and sheer air-moving horsepower needed.
Now, a full lot of 300mm wafers is too heavy for a person to carry around all day, cleanliness standards are higher, and material handling robots are cheap enough to replace humans. The new fabs store all wafers in sealed plastic FOUPs which are robotically delivered to each process tool. Only the inside of the positively-pressurized process tools has to be truly clean. The big squirrel-cage VLF fans have been replaced by an array of axial fans covering the roof that can be individually tweaked and adjusted to optimize airflow and power.
Companies still pretend it's a cleanroom and force people to wear smocks out of habit, but most of them are only held to class 10,000 or so, which is cleaner than your living room but not clean enough to make wafers in, without the FOUPs.
My mother would be so proud.
My father was an engineer for Western Electric and I remember him telling me many years ago about a MIG pilot that defected with the plane. Our guys were surprised to find that the advanced fighter used tubes in it's avionics. It was determined that the Soviets couldn't put together a good enough clean room to produce chips.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
So you think cleanrooms are dead technology because the next iteration and advancement of clean room tech doesn't follow the exact same path? All you are describing is clean room compartmentalization and automation. We stand on the shoulders of giants, this new tech stands on the sholders of Willis.