10 years in the 602 (Chapter 4)

This is an aerial view of the Motorola semiconductor plant at Broadway & Dobson in Mesa, Arizona (pre-demolition). See the white square in the center of the picture? Bipolar 3 is just to its left. That's where I'd be working. Remember the credit union I mentioned a few days ago? It's the small white building standing alone toward the lower right part of the property.

After meeting the CIM group (Nick, Linda, Brenda, Ron, and Don), I headed down to the fab for a familiarization tour. Remember the Intel commercials with the people that boogied in the bunny suits? Yes, we had to wear bunny suits in the fab. In Bipolar 3 (BP3), we didn't need supplied air - we just had fabric masks over our mouths and noses. The bunny suit consisted of a hood, gloves, shoe covers, and a one-piece coverall. There were two different types: blue and white. The blues were if you had to go in the stepper room (where the Nikon optical stepper machines were located), where the tolerance for particles in the air was even lower than in the rest of the fab.

My first assignment was to port the shop book system from the current (if dated) Data General computer to a newer Hewlett-Packard system. A "shop book" is a spiral-bound "recipe" for building a batch of chips. Printed on clean room paper (of course), the shop book was anywhere from 30 to over 100 pages, depending on the order. Every process was outlined in the book, with machine settings and parameters, and places for the operators to sign off. It didn't sound terribly automated to me, but then again I knew nothing of semiconductor manufacture at the time.