10:43
One of Frits Klostermann’s main jobs as the manager of the litho workshop at the Philips Natlab in the 60s was fighting dust.
Chip lithography is all about productivity and precision. But there’s also a third, equally important parameter. One that hardly reaches the public eye, but that’s at least as critical to system architects of a wafer scanner: cleanliness.
Chip production is a continuous effort to reduce particles. ICs in the making are vulnerable. They spend months in a waferfab before they’re ready. One hit by a single dust particle and the whole chip is wasted. That battle against dust began in the 1960s and has resulted in the cleanest environments on Earth – wafer fabs. Today, they consist of huge spaces that are significantly cleaner than any food production plant or surgery room.
11:35
The chip that Piet Haaijman brought from Silicon Valley to Philips’ Natlab in 1962 caused the sense of urgency needed to invest in lithography.
Compared to the US, Europe was another planet in the decades after World War II, in both economic and technological terms. Countries like England and France were putting money into defense technology, but not the billions the Americans were investing. Large industrial companies like Philips and Siemens primarily served consumers and other companies. There was barely room for tiny semiconductor startups; they lacked both the capital and the customers.
In America, it was mostly the Department of Defense that was stimulating research into the miniaturization of electronics. US companies had emerged from the war at full speed and were continuing to profit from a generous government budget for the development of military electronic applications. Modules filled with vacuum tubes and later transistors formed the new ‘brains’ in weapon