The air is changed every few seconds, the floor vibrates less than a laboratory bench and humans are the dirtiest thing in the building. Wafers travel in sealed pods on overhead rails between hundreds of tools, each step logged to the nanometre.
The human part
Engineers watch dashboards, chase yield excursions and plan maintenance windows months ahead. A single tool outage can idle a billion-dollar line. The job, one engineer says, is to make sure nothing interesting ever happens.
Key takeaways
- Overhead transport moves wafers between hundreds of tools
- Yield engineering is the core discipline
- Humans are the primary contamination source
This story is part of our ongoing coverage of hardware. We will update it as more details emerge.
