Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Cleanroom
Summary
A cleanroom or clean room is an engineered space, which maintains a very low concentration of airborne particulates. It is well isolated, well-controlled from contamination, and actively cleansed. Such rooms are commonly needed for scientific research, and in industrial production for all nanoscale processes, such as semiconductor manufacturing. A cleanroom is designed to keep everything from dust, to airborne organisms, or vaporised particles, away from it, and so from whatever material is being handled inside it.
A cleanroom can also prevent the escape of materials. This is often the primary aim in hazardous biology and nuclear work, in pharmaceutics and in virology.
Cleanrooms typically come with a cleanliness level quantified by the number of particles per cubic meter at a predetermined molecule measure. The ambient outdoor air in a typical urban area contains 35,000,000 particles for each cubic meter in the size range 0.5 μm and bigger, equivalent to an ISO 9 certified cleanroom. By comparison an ISO 14644-1 level 1 certified cleanroom permits no particles in that size range, and just 12 particles for each cubic meter of 0.3 μm and smaller. Semiconductor facilities often get by with level 7 or 5, while level 1 facilities are exceedingly rare.
The modern cleanroom was invented by American physicist Willis Whitfield. As employee of the Sandia National Laboratories, Whitfield created the initial plans for the cleanroom in 1960. Prior to Whitfield's invention, earlier cleanrooms often had problems with particles and unpredictable airflows. Whitfield designed his cleanroom with a constant, highly filtered air flow to flush out impurities. Within a few years of its invention in the 1960s, Whitfield's modern cleanroom had generated more than US billion today).
The majority of the integrated circuit manufacturing facilities in Silicon Valley were made by three companies: MicroAire, PureAire, and Key Plastics.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
Related courses (9)
MICRO-331: Microfabrication technologies
The student will learn process techniques and applications of modern micro- and nanofabrication, as practiced in a clean room, with a focus on silicon, but also multi-material microsystems and flexibl
MICRO-621: MOOC: Micro and Nanofabrication (MEMS)
Micro- and nanofabrication can be taught to students and professionals by textbooks and ex-cathedra lectures, but the real learning comes from seeing the manufacturing steps as they happen. This MOOC
MICRO-431: Materials and technology of microfabrication
The student will learn procedures and applications of modern microfabrication technologies, as practiced in a clean room environment, in particular modern techniques that go beyond the classical steps