Production Materials

Abstract

It is obvious that we must bring a number of things into our controlled environment besides clean conditioned air, equipment, and ultrapure water. If we are to do any production work, or research involving the production of contamination-sensitive items, we must bring the materials used to create our items into the cleanroom. Naturally, unless we can have a robot-run facility, we will also have to allow people into our pristine area. This allowance is a problematic one and one which we shall discuss in Chapter 11. We will treat the bringing in of production materials in this chapter. Please note that many of these materials are not only contamination-sensitive but are also extremely dangerous. We will discuss the hazards of our trade in considerably more detail in Chapter 12, but we cannot decouple the facets of contamination control and safety, and so we will slant our discussions of production materials in both directions in the following sections.