Fab-ulously home!

For the first 16years and 3months of my career at Intel, walking into the fab wearing a bunny suit was just my daily routine. Only after moving on from it did I realize that it truly became a proud piece of my identity.

I correlate working in cleanroom with the most sophisticated sense of equality. I enjoyed that the fab did not differentiate the technician driving a solvent cart from the senior program director running the ship. Employees of all genders wore the same suit, hoodie, booties and gloves, and, regardless of how popular you were, you still had to make your badge visible. And EVERYONE had to walk the mile or more back to the gown room to degown before answering the nature calls. :)

That sense of uniformity and equality forms just the surface of my admiration for fab. Once inside the fab, the enormousness of these machines and their multi-million dollar price tags, contrasting with the ever-shrinking feature sizes on the chips, is simply astounding. The robots, the wiring, the quartz, the magnets, the chemicals and the light and the invisible software that all come together to make sub-atomic precision possible- it truly is a wonderland in there!

But then, pandemic fell upon us, and I felt compelled to do something else, learn something new. I moved out of fab, worked with a boat load of Applied Materials tools purchased by Intel, in conjunction with Intel's TD, GSM and Trades teams. I absolutely enjoyed meeting some of the smartest individuals while on this job, designing, planning, strategizing, purchasing, and building the most cutting edge technology and equipment. I certainly learnt a lot, both about work and about myself. I learnt that work is chaotic no matter where you go, and that I tend to prefer the structured chaos of the factory versus the external unstructured circus that is necessary to support the factory. I truly missed being inside the fab.

When the opportunity of being an ASML EDE knocked on my door that would help me get my feet back in the fab, I grabbed it with both hands. It has been a couple of weeks in my new job, and I already feel like the college student that came home for holidays. I am in meetings with people I started my career with. Two days ago, I donned my bunnysuit again and went back inside the fab for the first time in almost two years. I went to the pole location where Intel installed its very first immersion lithography tool, that I helped qualify with my own nitrile-gloved hands. The tool that once had my name on a laminated sheet stuck on it has been bagged and its parts got repurposed many years ago, but it warmed my heart simply staring at that pole. I thought of the many days and nights I spent right there, under those oranage fab lights and the OHVs zipping by, learning about chemicals, robots, motors, work, working relationships, and life.

It feels good to be back to the structured chaos of the fab that I call home!