Wafer Fabrication

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I just got a job offer from a company that does wafer fabrication, I'll work in a clean-room setting (I'll have to wear a suit) and work with a SCADA system.

Does anyone here have experience with any of this? What are the daily issues or problems that come up in an environment like this? Are there any Industrial or manufacturing technicians here? This is going to be my first real job in manufacturing.

I guess this means I'm a trailblazer, I'm reading "But how do it know" by J. Clark Scott, it explains how a computer works in layman's terms.

Did they offer you the job without any qualifications?

No, I have a technical degree.

...Suit as in business suit or protecting yourself/Hazmat (that's overly dramatic , but) suit ?

My mom used to do wafer fabrication for Motorola, but I don't know much about it. She's pretty aspie-like but is unaware of it, so she probably has some useful info, but I'm not sure how to ask her about it.

Closer to the latter, but I think it's less about protecting you (the wearer) and more about protecting the stuff you're working with. Here is a wikipedia article on cleanroom suits.

Cyllya1 is correct, this type of suit is like a hazmat suite, only opposite in function. It is designed to protect the room from my personal contaminants (hair, skin cells, etc..)

Wafer fabrication is very exact, I can only imagine how many datapoints this process would monitor. Here's what I understand so far:

• An extremely thin slice is taken from a cylinder of pure Sillicon

• This slice will get doped with chemical impurities (Si does not actually conduct electricity, using dopants allows Si to behave like a lightswitch)

• This slice will also get heated to create a chemical reaction which will uniformly distribute these dopants

• Lasers are used to carve out conductive pathways (usually filled with Copper)

If you step back from the mind-boggling chemistry it takes to make Si and its P / N dopants useful; the payoff is having the simple, predicable behavior of logic-gates. A bit in computer memory is made up of 4 NAND gates. This and a combination of other logic gates are what makes the computer function.

I did some work in wafer fab as well as thin film metallization. I have since moved into failure analysis of electronic components. Microelectronics and more specifically materials engineering has been my line of work over 25 years. I don't have a college degree, but most of my work is on an engineer level. Enjoy your job and post here every now and then, maybe we can talk shop!

Congratulations on the new job!

Thanks BTDT.

Genedig65, I do a little fabrication now for my school job, I've just caught on to banana plugs and how they make life easier. I do the fabrication with acrylic boards and use a 3d printer to make button/jack mounts. My work looks pretty rough, but at least the mistakes are all out of the way.