Pure dress code: the cleanroom suit does not protect the wearer, but the semiconductors from him. Ventilation and filter systems also work so thoroughly that the air is cleaner than in any operating room.
Image: Infineon
If you want chips, you need a lot of patience. Why is production so complicated? A visit to the clean room, in the heart of the European chip industry, provides a few answers.
E.A good hour of the factory tour is over when Germar Schneider does something that normally must not be done under any circumstances: He picks up a thin wafer. The wafer, a disk made of pure silicon on which dozen of chips with billions of transistors are applied, measures 300 millimeters in diameter. It is so sensitive that it can only be moved on rails, with robots and sometimes only in a vacuum. The wafer writhes elastically in Schneider’s hands and makes noises like a theremin.
Of course, Schneider knows what he’s doing. The chemist has been with Infineon, Germany’s largest chip manufacturer, for more than 25 years. He is the specialist for the automation of factory processes and the handling of high-performance thin wafers, which are ground down from 0.7 to 0.06 millimeters in thickness towards the end of their manufacturing process. In a good mood, Schneider pulled the wafer, on which there are already broken points, out of a cabinet, not from one of the production facilities. It serves to illustrate a popular product that leaves the factory here in Dresden, the European center of semiconductor production.
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