CLEAN ROOM!

Dear You,

As you people know, I am an electrical engineer or to be frank, an Electronics Engineer for I dont suit Electrical even as a misnomer! Think Electronics and you think Chips!!The cute black ones with pins like spider legs that do many wonders in a host of gadgets! The more we think about it, the more curious we get to know whats inside it. This curiosity in me drove me to VLSI and MEMS that have their roots in Microfabrication. Till this day, all I saw was pictures and softwares about designing stuff inside the black beauty! I never knew for real whats inside or how it looks inside! All I knew was loads about Device physics theory, layouts and schematic diagrams, simulation softwares,some jazz like class1000 and class100 and microfabrication processes! For a real EE enthusiast, the urge to see the end of books in this and get to the real small world is very severe!

Today, things changed. My first lab on Silicon Microfabrication's first class!For once, all visions transcended classroom boundaries and imaginations. I was on the Fab floor in a Class 1000 room that they call the "Clean Room"! A Class 1000 chamber has just a maximum concentration of 1000 particles (5 microns maximum in diameter) per cubic feet of air!! I was shown the entire Microlab facility at the University of Cincinnati. The Photoresist Spinners, Pre and post bake ovens, odidation and reduction chambers, thim film growing areas, mask aligners, bonding machines, Reactive Ion Etching and Deep Reactive Ion Etching areas, Atomic microscopes, the million dollar e-beam lithography and photolithography equipments! I was also shown the Clean100 and even the clean 10 rooms! I was like a kid enjoying and learning every moment inside!! Oh yeah..I forgot to tell you the strange outfit we wore!! It was just like a Bugs Bunny Suit without those long ears!! It was so much fun to be in it! Looked like we were all set for some clandestine operation!

After a long session on the safety equipments and lab rules, which as u can guess, were a lot important in labs like these, we were taught to use AutoCAD2000 for drawing Masks for Lithography for we will be starting our fabrication of a pressure sensor from next week!!Though we need to spend a lot of hours on this lab preparing all pre-reqs for the fab, writing lengthy reports and grading is no joke with Dr.Ahn here, its still fun. Its atleast not just class and boards and lectures!

Hope this serves as the foundation for my entire career coz I am planning for a living with this!

Definitely,
Me.