Bavarian Semiconductors

First week here at my new job and this place is pretty cool. It’s huge! There’s like a thousand people here. I’ve worked for bigger companies (hello Bechtel Power Corporation) but never on one site bustling with so many engineers, managers, operators, techs, administrators and support types. The machines they make are really really cool – they’re Ion Implanters. Ion implantation is one of the key steps in semiconductor manufacture, strip the electrons off of the atoms of your choice (arsenic, selenium, gallium, whatever), use some big fucking magnets to accelerate and focus the particles into a coherent beam and blast your silicon wafer with it. How fast and how long your keep the beam on the wafer determines how much the silicon gets doped with ions to a particular depth and concentration. Depending on what kind of chip your making, the wafer will go through a dozen to fifty or more implant sessions. There’s this other next-generation-ish implanter they make too, doesn’t use an ion beam, it makes a cloud of plasma around the wafer and pulses it with electricity and the ions in the plasma soak into the wafer that way. The plasma process is for when you don’t want to subject your wafer to a high-energy beam, and it’s a lot faster than running a beam over the silicon, but there are some implant uniformity issues you have to deal with. They’re working on it.

And these tools are so impressive cuz they’re so goddamn big. Last company I worked at the machines were about the size of an SUV, these things are the size of a large U-Haul truck. And when you open them up there are radiation hazard stickers all over the place, my boss sez that’s because if something goes wrong the ion source has a tendency to generate a lot of X-rays, that’s why the enclosure doors and walls are lined with lead. I was wondering why those doors are so heavy. And parts of the machine are on isolation bushings, you know those accordioned cylindrical things you see on big sparky electrical machinery, often supporting shiny steel spheres between which lightning bolts zap in crackling arcs. Nothing says mad scientist laboratory better than big isolation bushings. I’m hoping I can come in after hours and create life. Mad!! I’ll show them, those fools, they called me MAD at community college!!!

Can I at least make a radioactive spider?