A Chip Is Born: Inside a State-of-the-Art Clean Room

From: http://www.wired.com/

By Dylan F. Tweney and Jonathan Snyder

If you wish to compose an e-mail, index a database of web pages, stream a kitten video in 720p or render an explosion at 60 frames per second, you must first build a computer.

And to build a computer, you must first design and fabricate the tiny processors that rapidly churn through the millions of discrete computational steps behind every one of those digital actions, taking a new step approximately 3 billion times per second.

To do all this, you are probably going to need chip-manufacturing machines from Applied Materials, one of the main suppliers of such equipment to the semiconductor industry.

Applied's machines subject silicon wafers (such as the Intel wafer shown below) to incredibly intense vacuums, caustic chemical baths, high-energy plasmas, intense ultraviolet light, and more, taking the wafers through the hundreds of discrete manufacturing steps required to turn them into CPUs, memory chips and graphics processors.

Because those processes aren't exactly friendly to humans, much of this work happens inside sealed chambers where robot arms move the wafers from one processing station to another. The machines themselves are housed within clean rooms whose scrubbed air (and bunny-suited employees) keep the risk of aerial contamination low: A single dust particle from your hair is all it takes to ruin a CPU that might sell for $500, so companies are eager to minimize how often that happens.

Wired/com recently toured Applied Materials' Maydan Technology Center, a state-of-the-art clean room in Santa Clara, California, where Applied develops and tests its machines.

Its 39,000 square feet of ultraclean workspace equals about 81 yards of a football field, and is divided into three huge "ballrooms," each of which is crammed full of Applied's multimillion-dollar machines, alongside pipes, tubes, spare parts, tanks of caustic chemicals, Craftsman tool chests and huge racks of silicon wafers. To get inside, you must suit up in a bunny suit, with a face mask and goggles, two pairs of gloves, and shoe-covering footies. We couldn't even take a reporter's notebook inside: Instead, Applied's staff gave us a shrink-wrapped, specially sanitized clean-room notebook and clean-room pen to use.

It's not a manufacturing facility. Instead, this clean room simulates the fabs where Applied's machines will be used, enabling the company (and its customers) to test out new techniques and processes before putting them on the production line. As such, it provides a rare glimpse inside the world of cutting-edge semiconductor manufacturing.

Top photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
Bottom photo: Intel

Woman disfigured after injecting lube into her face

By Emily Kaiser

If you're looking for cheaper alternatives to botox and silicone injections from the doctor to pretty up your face, think again. This lady learned the hard way.

This Twin Cities mom, who didn't want to be named, bought 100% silicone lube online and syringes at a local pharmacy and tried to inject it herself. The product clearly says it's a personal lubricant for external use only.

Her experiment ended miserably and she now has pools of lube in her lips and cheekbones. She's facing huge medical bills to fix her face.

The woman bought the silicone online for $10, hoping to make her upper lip fuller and fill in acne scars. She had previously been to a doctor who gave her silicone treatments, but the $2,700 price tag made it tough to go back again.

Despite the site's warnings about the lube, she figured it was the same because it was 100 percent silicone. So she bought it and did it herself. Bad idea. Unlike Botox and collagen, silicone is permanent because it isn't absorbed by the body. That's why she has lube pockets on her face now.

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"Initially I thought I did a good job," she said. However, within a day her lips and cheek were disfigured.

"Its very frightening, its very embarrassing having to be in public," she said.

Now this Twin Cities mother will be going to California to consult with a plastic surgeon. She faces thousands of dollars in medical bills.

"I feel that some of it can be fixed. I don't know how much," she said.

Watch the video here.