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Clean Rooms to Make Semiconductors

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As a manufacturing facility, you produce boards for electronic products. These boards cannot be made on just any platform. They have to be built in a special room called a clean room. In the course of making electronic components, especially chips, the environment and atmosphere must be as clean as possible. Why? Because the chip is only about the size of a dime and contains millions of microscopic transistors. If the tiniest speck of dust were to get on a chip, it could ruin the transistors. Believe it or not, these chips are so small that a tiny speck of dust would look like a huge boulder net to it. So image this speck getting on the surface of the chip while it is being created. The chip would be ruined.

Here are some things to think about regarding clean rooms:

• How clean: As stated above, the environment has to be kept totally clean. This room is so clean that you can practically eat off the floor. They are so clean you could take a microscope into the room and won’t find but perhaps on speck of dust per cubic foot. That’s clean.
• Small: Again, as was stated above, having a speck of dust on a chip would look like a boulder compared to the chip. Think if you lived in a city where mountains surrounded you and suddenly a boulder came loose and fell on the highway. Imagine the huge traffic jam it would cause. Eventually traffic would be stopped for miles. So think about if a speck of dust got onto a chip. This would create havoc for the chip; forcing it to fail.

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