Pyramids and Cleanrooms
Barbara Kanegsberg, BFK Solutions LLC
It was a colorful, romantic Phoenix sunset; we had just finished a wonderful day of videotaping programs about contamination control at GSFCC. A gleaming white pyramid shone at the top of a hill. What was it? We climbed up and discovered the burial site of the first governor of Arizona. It’s an important landmark, one we had not been aware of. To me, of course, the pristine, white pyramid covered in gleaming white tiles evoked a monument to a cleanroom.
OK, So much for Romance
Certainly, the Phoenix area, with a history of aerospace and semiconductor manufacturing, is a center for contamination control, so it might not be a totally-unexpected association. It got me thinking that, wherever we travel, when we introduce ourselves to people associated with contamination control, they usually say something like: “oh, so you clean the cleanrooms” (we don’t really do that). Or, “oh, so you find sources of contamination in cleanrooms” (getting warmer!). To many people involved in high-tech manufacturing, the assumption is that cleaning is associated not with critical cleaning of the product surface but rather with cleaning of the cleanroom or of the tools. Tools, by the way, encompass what many manufacturers would call fixtures.
Necessity
A properly-designed and appropriately-maintained cleanroom is essential for many high-value-manufacturing processes. However, I think we all may lose sight of the fact that controlling contamination of the cleanroom air and of the tools is a means to an end. All the cleanrooms and controlled environments, the standards, the monitoring equipment, the records, the hardware, the software, the training programs – they are all, in and of themselves, tools designed for manufacturing a high-quality product.
Reaching the Top of the Pyramid
How do we reach the epitome of contamination control? Controlled environments are essential, but not sufficient.
Critical cleaning, cleaning in a strategic manner at the appropriate places and times in the manufacturing process, is the challenge of the next decade. If we could conduct all manufacturing and fabrication in a controlled environment, in an environment that kept all unwanted soils off of the surface and that allowed cleaning processes to be well-understood and completely defined, manufacturing would be a lot simpler. Given the growing complexity of manufacturing, including the diversity of supply chains, both captive and external, such simplicity may be actually moving back toward the horizon.
However, we can refine and re-evaluated cleaning as a value-added process; we can understand the goals, challenges, and limitations of surface preparation and contamination control.
