Inside the fab: cleanrooms, shifts and tools
What does a place that makes chips look like? This section is about everyday life in a fab: why everyone wears a full bunny suit, why the fab never stops at night, what the lights on top of a tool are saying, and why a pod of wafers can't wait.
How clean is a cleanroom? What Class 100 and ISO 5 mean
Cleanroom classes count how many particles above a set size a cubic meter of air may hold. Class 100 vs ISO 5 under ISO 14644-1, and how fabs keep air clean.
Why do chip fab workers wear full bunny suits?
Chip fab workers are covered head to toe because people are a cleanroom's biggest source of dirt. Particles, cleanroom classes and gowning, explained.
Why do chip fabs run 24 hours a day?
Chip fabs run around the clock and engineers get calls at 3 a.m. Why fabs rarely stop, and how shifts and on-call work, in plain English.
What is Q-time, and why can't wafers wait?
Q-time is a fab's limit on how long a wafer may wait between two steps. Past it, the surface may have changed and the lot needs rework or scrap.
What do the red, yellow and green lights on a tool mean?
Every chip fab tool has a tower light: green is running, yellow is waiting or a warning, red is a fault. How to read it, and why yellow gets ignored.
- What is fab24hr?: the two ways to play, the four shifts, common questions, sources
- The life of a chip: how chips are made: tape-out, pilot run, mass production, wafer test, packaging, shipping
- A day in the life of a fab engineer: who does what (PE, EE, PIE, manufacturing), and the day hour by hour
- Who works in a chip fab: technicians, Manufacturing, process, equipment, Facilities, integration, QA, production control, masks, R&D, the chief, the vendor, and test and assembly at the test-and-assembly house: each role's day
- Chip fab jargon in plain English: MO, Hold, Q-time, OCAP and the rest, one plain sentence each
- fab24hr in the classroom: 20- and 40-minute lesson plans, one chapter of the main story per lesson, discussion questions, devices and privacy
- About and press kit: trailer, gameplay clips, descriptions and key facts