In planning for this issue, we made several industry leaders an offer they couldn't refuse. Their task: to share some of the most unforgettable stories of their careers. Their reward: phony prizes (a 5-lb. Bag O'Lint, Weekend Snood Wardrobe, combination Cleanroom Lunchbox/Toaster Oven, 55 gal. Drum of Unidentifiable Ooze) and the opportunity to once again astonish their friends and befuddle their adversaries in print....

In planning this article, we made several industry leaders an offer they couldn't refuse. Their task: to share some of the most unforgettable stories of their careers. Their reward: phony prizes (see Sidebar) and the opportunity to once again astonish their friends and befuddle their adversaries in print. Each story concludes with a pair of initials (see Contributors) indicating its source. (DR)

"I've got it covered!"

A new operator had been recently assigned to work in a semiconductor wafer fab. After attending protocol classes, she was determined to do everything in her power to protect her sensitive products. When the lots on which she had worked showed an increase in particle defects, QC asked her to demonstrate her material handling technique. Happy to cooperate, she showed the visitors how carefully she carried each wafer in her left hand...while holding her right hand over the wafer, to "protect" it from falling particles. (KG)

Where there's smoke...

A semiconductor fab built in 1968 employed true vertical unidirectional (through-the-floor) airflow. This had been accomplished by pouring a concrete slab with rectangular cutouts at frequent intervals. Steel grates across the cutouts permitted foot traffic while allowing air to flow downward. Fiberglass pans below caught liquid spills; debris, of course, accumulated in them. Broken wafers, pieces of tubing, lengths of electrical wire, nuts and bolts were surely to be expected...but cigarette butts? (KG)

"Mmm, mmm, good!"

Before there was any gowning in semiconductor fabs, workers often ate lunch at their workstations. In one instance, they enjoyed their mid-shift repast approximately 4 ft. from the load stations of horizontal three-stack diffusion furnaces processing 100 mm (4 in.) wafers. One day, an operator decided to use one of the tubes in "his" diffusion furnace to heat a can of pork and beans for lunch. Unfortunately, he left it in too long, and the resulting explosion left an unspeakable mess inside the process tool. (KG)

Hot tuna.

In the days when evaporation was used instead of sputtering to deposit an aluminum film, a group of yield engineers were trying to determine the cause of a strange device failure in the aluminum layer. Upon investigation, they found that one of the operators liked her tuna sandwich warm, and was using the evaporator to warm it up before lunch. (LL)

It ain't the heat...

A Ph.D. researcher asked why the humidity in his lab was higher than in surrounding areas. When we pointed out that there seemed to be no water or source visible, he asked "Water? What has that got to do with humidity?" (KG)

Your tax money at work.

In the late 1980s, a wafer fab facility was designed and built for a U.S. government agency. As with many such projects, it suffered from a combination of program errors, project delays, and government procurement policies. As a result, the facility was badly out of date before it was completed. With due regard for the public purse, the agency opted to simply abandon the "new" facility and start over. But before this could happen, it was deemed necessary to thoroughly test, adjust, balance, and certify the cleanroom and all of its air handling systems before any of the contractors could receive final payment for work performed. Only upon completion of these futile activities could the agency walk away from this otherwise new facility. (KG)

Something to write home about.

A company needed an aqueous-based washing agent that would leave a rust inhibition film on cast iron crankshafts after cleaning. So they made a list of 50 vendors and asked them to send samples, which they then tested.

Although the prices were very competitive, they chose the cheapest one that had passed their tests. When notified, the supplier announced that the product had been withdrawn because it wasn't profitable. So the company called the supplier offering the second-lowest cost, only to find that the recipe for the product had been changed because the product wasn't profitable, and the company's test was no longer valid. The company then called the supplier with the third-lowest cost; they would be glad for the business, but had raised the prices because they'd learned they had been selling too cheaply. They then called the supplier with the fourth-lowest cost, who admitted they had quoted based on bulk shipments; their price for the needed packaging was more than our cost-conscious firm really wanted to spend. Finally, our company called the vendor with the fifth-lowest price...who was pleased to take the order, and whose price was within a whisker of the average price of all the suppliers who had supplied test products.

The bottom line: this cost-conscious firm had spent more than $60,000 in person-costs (three entire months, with two to three persons @$45/hr.) for a product that would cost them $25,000/yr. and bought it at the average industry price. Here's the kicker: they thought they'd done so well that they sent a writeup of this accomplishment to the home office as an example of how things should be done. (JD)

When it rains...

Until the early 1980s, "Protopet" was used to create an airtight seal between ceiling filters and the ceiling structure. A substance closely resembling petroleum jelly in color, consistency, slipperiness, and general difficulty in handling, Protopet arrived on the job site in large steel drums and was heated to around 100¡ F, at which point it would liquefy. It would then be pumped into the channels that would later support the filter frames. As the liquid cooled, it would again take on the viscosity and consistency of petroleum jelly. Not surprisingly, installing Protopet was a messy, miserable job.

Environmental control systems often need tweaking during the early startup phase of any new cleanroom. At some point during this process, room temperature "excursions" can range from 100 to 130°F. When the use of Protopet was combined with such temperature excursions, the result was often a gooey "rainfall" of blobs and spatters, forming puddles and pools, stalactites and stalagmites throughout the cleanroom. (KG)

Water, water...

For a large biotech project in the Middle East, a U.S. firm had designed a sheet metal penthouse structure to house all of the facility's mechanical equipment. The penthouse was directly above a 10,000 sqft modular cleanroom, which took up the entire fourth floor of what had previously been an office building.

Imported from Italy as a skid-mounted unit, the WFI (water for injection) still had to be raised by crane to penthouse level (fifth floor) outdoors, and then tipped to fit through the opening into the penthouse. The still was hoisted successfully. But as it was tipped, the entire vessel, which had apparently been shipped with the water from the factory hydrotesting still inside, emptied, flooding the ceiling, walls, and eventually the entire cleanroom.

On the bright side, however, the WFI system vendor didn't charge the general contractor responsible for the installation for the extra water delivered along with the vessel. (SM)

And more water...

A firm was switching from solvent cleaning to aqueous cleaning. Since they'd been immersing parts in a vapor degreaser and then removing them all washed, rinsed, and dried, they thought aqueous cleaning worked the same way, only with different juices. So they built two large dip tanks, one for washing and the other for rinsing. They inserted the parts into the new wash tank, removed them, placed them in the new rinse tank, took them out/and were surprised when the parts didn't come out dry. Naturally, since they hadn't included any fluid force in the design of their aqueous tanks, the parts hadn't been cleaned or rinsed, either. But they couldn't understand the outcome, since they were absolutely certain they'd done everything right! (JD)

Out, damned spot!

We were inspecting the assembly and installation of our company's stick-built ceiling system in a world-class semiconductor wafer fab. The ceiling components had been wiped down and packaged under clean conditions in our factory. The assembly was to take place under the very strictest of clean construction protocols, which included full gowning and airlock entry into the area under construction.

As I entered, I was detained by the CCP (Clean Construction Police), who insisted on wiping down even the top rim of my eyeglasses so that I would carry absolutely no dust into the room.

Once inside, we noticed dust particles on the ceiling components lying about on jig tables. Soon, we learned that the floor of the fab had been covered with ordinary forms-grade plywood to protect it during construction. Every time somebody stepped on it, dust particles would be released into the air. (The fab was under positive pressure at this point as well.)

Still, the fab was completed in record time, and performed according to specification. Protocols were not revised to reflect the additional requirement for particulate preloading imposed by the use of construction grade plywood as cleanroom floor protection. (SM)

Toxic stupidity.

During the early days of semiconductor manufacturing, a major company used several epitaxial reactors to deposit doped films. Like today's epi reactors, these reactors used the toxic gases phosphine and arsine to deliver the dopant. But back then, toxic gas monitors were hard to come by.

Being concerned about employee safety, someone got the bright idea to get some canaries and put them in the epi processing area, just as canaries had been used in coal mines before the advent of gas detection tools and technologies. The canaries happily coexisted with the epi reactors until one weekend when the fab was closed.

When the maintenance crew came in on Monday morning, the canaries were dead. The fab was evacuated, and emergency procedures to find the leak were begun.

In the end, toxic stupidity, not gas, was to blame: no one had fed or watered the canaries. (LL)

"Booties?"

In the mid-1980s I was working on a project for a major electronics firm, supporting the design and manufacture of infrastructure ventilation equipment for a state-of-the-art, Class 100 facility. The Project Manager had vanished during the early stages of design ... and, as I later discovered, he had been the only person on the project with any real-world experience in the building of a cleanroom facility for semiconductor manufacturing.

Because this was a design/build project, I spent as much time with the contractor as I did with the engineers and architects in conceptualizing how the project would come together. Out of ignorance, and with confidence instilled by many previous successful experiences with this client on other sites, I developed basic specs for the equipment and mapped out the system's performance requirements. I felt no need to share what I knew about clean construction protocol, and simply followed my company's guidelines for clean build, packaging, and shipping of the tight tolerance, low vibration fans. But called to the site for an emergency meeting, I found chaos.

The general contractor, who had never before built a cleanroom facility, had followed the usual protocols for commercial structures; there were no paved staging areas around the building, lumber catwalks straddled the mud (it was winter in the north country), and a general disregard for keeping this mess outside pervaded the site. The roofer hadn't sealed the roof. After a torrential rain, my equipment was standing in 10 in. of muddy water inside the building. It took two weeks to remove the water, clean the equipment, and either re-paint or replace various items. At last, the room and the support systems were protocoled, the equipment was started up, the cleanroom was pressurized ... and the owner's representative, engineers, contractors, and I gathered to perform one last inspection of the finished project. As we were ushered into the room, I noticed that there had been no change in access procedures. As we entered the room, which did not yet have a raised floor, I wondered aloud if it wouldn't be appropriate for "booties" to be donned at this time?

"Booties?" someone asked. "What are booties?" (SY)

Speak softly and carry...

Many years ago, I was the "college boy" helping in the rebuilding of a cleaning machine. At one point we needed a bigger pipe wrench, so the boss sent me (the "gofer") off after it, suggesting a 36 in. model. So off I went to the tool crib.

"Nope, don't have one that big...try over at the next area," they said. I went there, and three other places, ready to retrieve the largest pipe wrench I could find. I finally went back to the tool crib and the other four sites and asked the folks there to let me look at their biggest pipe wrench. I chose the one with the largest distance between the jaws, but noted that this distance was around only about 12 in. How long would a 36 in. pipe wrench be, I wondered. Who could use it? Who could even pick it up?

Back I came, dragging this huge pipe wrench. I was disappointed; I had let the boss down and I knew he was going to let me know it. I hadn't come back with anything close to a 36 in. wrench.

Naturally, I apologized and related my adventures. The others started snickering, and I figured the boss was going to tear into me -- the "college boy" --for not being able to get the job done. He did, with no mercy, though the others struggled to suppress their laughter. The boss said he knew there was a 36 in. pipe wrench on site, and I shouldn't come back until I found it! Off I went again.

I never found that pipe wrench. The job got done without it somehow, so naturally I never mentioned the subject again. After a while, the snickering died down, and someone took mercy on me. They told me that the size of a pipe wrench was the length of the handle, not the distance between the jaws. The wrench I had brought back was in fact way too large! (JD)

Conclusion

Not all cleanroom bloopers have happy endings: a maintenance worker at a prestigious research facility once decided, contrary to all the rules, that he could change an arsine bottle by himself. They found his body beside the empty bottle. (If he'd had a buddy beside him wearing a Scott Air Pack, he could have been saved.) (LL)

Our point: With the exception of the final story, which has never been and will never be a source of amusement to anyone, stories like these are amusing in retrospect...but only in retrospect. To those who lived these stories, each proved costly in terms of time, productivity, and profitability. One proved too costly.

So why tell these stories? So we can learn, and try not to repeat them or create new ones for tomorrow's Clean Manufacturing professionals to tell. (DR)