What is a clean room environment

Clean room environment requirement

Clean room is a space where the enviroment and the quality of air  were strictly controlled by many modern techniques. In the clean room environment must satisfy certain criteria: temperature, humidity, air flow and air pressure. It uses the gas treatment and purification equipment to minimize the amount of dust, microbiology, steam ... in the clean room.

The modern cleanroom was invented by American physicist Willis Whitfield. An employee of the Sandia National Laboratories, Whitfield created the initial plans for the cleanroom in 1960. Prior to Whitfield's invention, earlier cleanrooms often had problems with particles and unpredictable airflows. Whitfield designed his cleanroom with a constant highly filtered air flow to flush out impurities. Within a few years of its invention in the 1960s, sales of Whitfield's modern cleanroom had generated more than $50 billion in sales worldwide. Ref: wikipedia

People working in the clean room is a source producing dust. When people move around, it can produce up to 100 000 particles (larger than 0.5 micromet) and thousands of micron-sized dust particles on his body every minute. Therefore, with clean rooms, we have limited the number of workers, corresponding to the size of the room. And to ensure that the environment in the room, machinery and equipments produce particles, then, workers worked in clean room should be forced in a restricted standard is essential way to minimize the amount of dust produced.

The equipment needed for the work, including: You can see the images as well:

• Protective clothing (Clean suit or Clean clothes). 
• Usually shirt and pants one piece.
• Helmets to the first cluster (I remember the hair is also a source of dust)
• Sealed beam canvas shoes feet.
• Mask of the beam, which can include breathing air filter masks, eye protection, gloves
• Pants jerseys, caps, masks, shoe usually made ​​of canvas, the outside surface is smooth, no dust, while ensuring easy for people to move and operate.

An employee working in the clean room, bring protective gear: coat, hat, mask, gloves.

In physics, materials science, clean rooms used for manufacturing technology requires high purity materials such as: photolithography, thin-film technology (MBE, sputtering, CVD, etc.), technology of Semiconductor, electronic components, micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS and NEMS), the refined analysis, the physical and chemical treatments... Come now, I sure that you can answer for the question of  "Why use clean room? ". If you can not answer the Question, you can imagine that the work of manufacturing semiconductor technology components the size of micrometer to nanometer size, just a very very small amount of dust can stick to will completely change the characteristics of the product.

Reference Document:


W. Whyte, A short course on cleanroom technology: Fundamentals of design, testing and operation (Handout of University of Glasgow), Glasgow, 2006.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room
http://www.rockwellautomation.com/anorad/guide/cleanroom_criteria.html [4] W. Whyte, Clean room Technology: Fundamentals of design, testing and operating a room, John Wiley and Sons Inc., (2001).
(Theo Vật Lý Việt Nam www.physvn.org)