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The Tech museum gets ready
for a high-tech barn raising

Motorists driving through Pittsburgh's Hazelwood section at night can see an orange glow ignite the sky. The illuminated show issues from coke ovens making fuel at a searing 2000°F for the blast furnaces that convert iron ore to steel. For a passerby outside the mill on the shore of the Monongahela River, that glow offers an eye-catching glimpse of the steel-making process.

COMING SOON: The Tech Museum of Innovation's cleanroom exhibit, called Miniature Revolution, will be one of the main attractions when the new $17-million museum opens in fall 1998.

In Sunnyvale, CA, and other Silicon Valley towns, chipmakers also use furnaces, of course. But unless you're inside the fab you won't see any sign of them, day or night. To the average passerby the fascinating conversion of sand into slivers of processed silicon might as well be alchemy.

It is the virtual invisibility of the semiconductor manufacturing process that has caught the attention of The Tech Museum of Innovation. Since opening its doors in November 1990, the museum in downtown San Jose has featured a mock cleanroom as part of its microelectronics exhibit, one of the institution's six interactive attractions designed to enthrall visitors and educate them about the technological wonders affecting their lives.

In the fall of 1998 The Tech, as it's known, will take that mission several steps further when it takes the wraps off a new 110,000-sq-ft museum under construction not far from the current, smaller site. The museum will house an improved cleanroom exhibit measuring 1200 sq ft, three times larger than the current one. Dubbed Miniature Revolution, the exhibit may bring grateful tears to the eyes of any process engineer who has ever attempted to explain to her sister from Indiana--or uncle from Sunnyvale, for that matter--how a semiconductor is made, why she needs to wear those funny spacesuits, and why the cleanroom is the machine shop of the Information Age.

"Chip technology is vital to our area. A lot of it was invented here and so the people in this valley are aware of chip technology and are curious about it," explains Greg Brown, the museum's director of technology development. "Ironically, it's very difficult to see it, [because] unlike steel mills there's nothing [as visible as] that here. The chips leave the fabs in tiny trucks. You hardly ever notice that they're here. You could spend your whole life in Silicon Valley and never see anything to do with chip fabrication.

"Most of our audience will never be able to see the inside of a real cleanroom," continues Brown, and Miniature Revolution is designed to give "most of those people insight into something they pass within a hundred yards of," yet barely notice. The challenge for the director of technology development and his staff was in determining the best approach for demystifying the alien world of the cleanroom. Ultimately, the exhibit's developers decided to use the "chips-in-my-life angle."

"As visitors approach this area, they will encounter a normal-looking home with a shake roof and clapboard siding," explains Brown. "They'll enter this facade, and they'll quickly see some examples of how microcircuits are used in the home--microwave ovens, for instance, and some less obvious examples. Then they'll notice that at the back of this homey area is a glowing space. They approach it, and it's a six-foot-long air-shower tunnel."

Through that tunnel will be "this strange new world. You come out the other side into a dazzling white cleanroom space with shiny walls, perforated floors, and HEPA ceilings. You've suddenly gone from your house into the world of the cleanroom."

Like the other exhibits at The Tech, Miniature Revolution will be designed as a teaching tool, Brown says. One wall will present a time line of the development of the integrated circuit with a description of Moore's Law to explain the concept of shrinking chip size. Turning around, visitors will discover a glass wall with a space approximately 4-ft deep behind it that will simulate a fab area. Most visitors will not be allowed in this area, the mock cleanroom. Inside that space will be bezels containing the fab's three main pieces of equipment--a furnace, a stepper, and an etcher.

"Periodically, a museum staff member dressed in a Class 1 suit with a helmet will select a child from the audience, and the child will put on a set of booties, a bonnet, and a lab coat--not a full suit--and these two people will enter the particle counter booth," Brown says. The staffer will explain how particle counters work and why contamination on the chip "is a big deal." The child will take the bonnet off to watch the digital display rise. This fortunate visitor will then be escorted into the sanctum sanctorum of the fab itself where he or she will be allowed to operate the furnace, conduct a wafer inspection, see how wafer sizes have changed, and learn about the importance of yields.

Brown believes that visitors will come away with an understanding of how the process works, with its steppers, masks, and etchers, through comparisons with photography and other similar processes. "We've discovered that chipmaking is similar in some ways to batik. And a lot of people, kids especially, know that kind of stuff." He calls the exhibit "a sort of orientation" that will give both children and adults an interactive opportunity to see "what it's like to work in a cleanroom and be in this isolated environment." The shortened process description will be relatively free of jargon and specific chemical names.

The wall between the chase and the cleanroom will be transparent so that visitors can see just how intricate the process equipment is. After the program, visitors will be invited to look on the other side of the gray area at the back of the machinery. Chipmakers and vendors have donated approximately $6 million in equipment and services, Brown says. Many of the vendors are reconfiguring the equipment with cutaways and open panels to give visitors a glimpse of how the tools function.

More than 500 companies are supplying hardware. They include Advanced Micro Devices, Applied Materials, Asyst Technologies, Dryden Engineering, Hewlett-Packard, Met One, Ultratech Stepper, and Worklon. Kokusai Electric America, for example, is fixing the robotics on a three-year-old furnace donated by Intel as well as providing field service. Lam Research is also "doing the same thing with one of their etchers."

A nonprofit institution, The Tech relies to a great extent on help from industry to achieve its goal of making Miniature Revolution as realistic as possible within its budget. Recognizing that "the staff of The Tech is not composed of cleanroom experts," Brown assembled a "cleanroom team of approximately 40 people from 30 different companies in the area, all of whom are involved in one aspect of the process or another."

The team was instrumental in getting the museum to see the importance of contamination and defect control in semiconductor manufacturing. "We were focused on the chip, and what the team helped us to discover is that the secret to the whole thing is the [cleanroom] environment. The only reason you can make this chip is because you have this incredibly clean environment. We learned that contamination is not just dust. It's also static, impurities, vibration--all these stray factors that you have to eliminate because you want the process to be as reproducible as possible. That's a bit of insight that really shaped how we will present the information."

Jodelle French, curator of the Intel Museum in Santa Clara, CA, is an informal adviser to The Tech. She had to step down from her role on The Tech's committee when Intel decided to expand its own museum because of its popularity as a Silicon Valley tourist destination. Visitors today, she notes, want interaction. "The mode in exhibits now is experiential. It's not just problem-solving but getting the experience across."

Intel has donated a PRI Automation wafer sorter with a robotic arm that had been used in its museum, says French. The microprocessor giant had considered donating an air shower, but French notes that Intel and most chipmakers no longer use them, preferring a long hallway where the "pass-through pressure of the air does the same thing as that 30 seconds in an air shower." She laments their absence. "It's a shame, because they're superpopular, especially with kids. We aimed a live camera at a little air shower, and you could watch people go through it. You were able to see what we called 'the air-shower dance.'"

Oscar Gomez, facilities engineering manager for process tool manufacturer Lam Research in Fremont, CA, was brought on board to shape the exhibit's development. He helped the staff select materials. "They toured our facility and copied some of the details," he says. Gomez notes that the Rainbow etcher donated by Lam to the museum "adds a historical perspective" to the cleanroom exhibit, because it is "one of the tools" that has brought the development of the integrated circuit "to where it is today."

Gomez points out that the exhibit will be as authentic as its budget, and industry contributions, will allow. "Microcontamination control is very expensive. A fab will pay anywhere from $3000 to $5000 per square foot for a typical submicron, 200-mm-process cleanroom. The Tech didn't have anywhere near that much money to spend, nor did they want to do that. The challenge was to convey a controlled environment within a very limited budget--basically, what people could afford to give. Is that going to happen? I think so."

The Tech is "soliciting help from the microcontamination control community," says Gomez. That help could come in the form of "a vacuum wand, a piece of floor tile, or a HEPA filter. All these things are needed for the project. It is actually coming together that way." Other items the museum could use include CCD cameras, chip samples, airflow visualizers, gas-handling equipment, microscopes, photos, furniture, and small historical artifacts.

What item is most needed? "Right now I think the floor. These floor tiles are like cash, because all the new fabs coming up have created a great demand for them." Exactly 315 static-dissipative aluminum tiles are needed to achieve the proper cleanroom effect, though no air will be flowing through them. "We want people to walk on the floor and get a feel for what it is like to work in a cleanroom."

Brown, Gomez, and others have an almost missionary belief in the project. Gomez says he will be among those "looking forward to rolling up our sleeves and installing all these donated components and tools. That ought to be a lot of fun." The Tech's director of technology development encourages that sense of camaraderie. Brown, notes Gomez with a chuckle, has called gatherings to discuss Miniature Revolution "barn raising meetings."

For more information on Miniature Revolution, contact Greg Brown at 408/279-7183; fax, 408/279-7197. The Tech's Web address is http://www.thetech.org.

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