Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

by Ed Conway

Beneath the sub-fab is one of the most sophisticated set of dampers on the planet, meaning the edifice is almost entirely disconnected from terra firma, which, given this is one of the more seismically active parts of the world, is no bad thing. Any movement, however indiscernible, can disturb the workings of the machinery here, which is why you don’t tend to find fabs very close to airports or motorways. Those machines are comfortably the most expensive thing in the fab. There are whole rows of them, most of them white, self-contained units about the size of a minibus. Some of them implant chemicals on to the wafers—doping, as it’s called—others deposit nanolayers of material and some use lasers to etch circuits on to the silicon. Back in the 1950s, semiconductor assembly involved lines of women working at desks, using tweezers to manipulate transistor wires into place. In today’s fabs you might see one or two human beings, kitted up in white body suits so as not to introduce impurities to the cleanroom, but almost everything here is done by robots. These plants are so automated they are known as “lights-out” fabs—where they can operate almost entirely without workers. It is a surreal, somewhat dystopian vision: a world without humans. Yet from a silicon wafer’s perspective, human beings with their grimy nails, their flaky skin and tainted breath are walking vectors for impurities. All you need in one of these fabs is for a single stray atom to float into the machinery an...