Cleanroom retrofit projects change hands

Mark A. DeSorbo

WOBURN, MA — The charge of upgrading and expanding existing cleanrooms is enough to strike fear into even the bravest facilities directors.

After all, they are usually not involved in that process. That was until the wave of mergers and acquisitions hit the contamination control industry and eliminated a layer of professionals that included the people who typically handled that task.

“We're seeing two things, the first being expansion of existing process areas and second, the tearing out of existing processes and its recreation for a new process. That responsibility now falls on one of three people, the plant engineer, the production or process engineer or a quality control employee,” says CleanRooms columnist Richard A. Matthews, chairman of the International Organization for Standardization Technical Committee ISO/TC 209 Cleanrooms and Associated Clean Environments.

But if there is to be one, Matthews, founder of Filtration Technology Inc. (Greensboro, NC) and vice president of Micron Video International, says the cleanroom professional is most likely hired as a consultant. “The cleanroom knowledge is coming from outside the organization. With consolidations and downsizing, there have been a lot of people flushed out who once had those responsibilities,” he adds. “The business wasn't there to support them. A whole layer of middle management, where the cleanroom guy was, was phased out over the last 10 years.”

The engineers or employees who now have the responsibility of upgrading or expanding cleanrooms find themselves turning to standards boards for help. On one day in November, a roomful lent their ears to Joe Torrice, facilities director at Alpha Industries (Woburn) and Daniel A. Mahoney, vice president for engineering at J.M. Coull Inc., a construction company based in Concord, MA. They were on hand to present “Upgrading and Expanding Existing Cleanrooms,” a seminar that was hosted by the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (IEST; Oak Brook, IL).

“We're trying to educate ourselves,” says Kristen Carlson-Ellis, a project manager from Textron Systems Inc. (Wilmington, MA), who attended the seminar to learn how best to expand and upgrade Textron's cleanrooms. “We're trying to design, spec and build them.”

The task of upgrading and expanding Alpha's existing cleanrooms, explained Torrice, which range from Class 100 to Class 10,000, was a difficult one. “What we needed to do was transform our military-contract base business into a high volume company,” he says. “On top of that, we did not have the time to shut down because of business commitments. Our orders had doubled.”

The project affected such services as electricity, low-pressure steam, chilled water, hot water, exhaust and gas supplies. Aside from meeting orders, Alpha also had to deal with output issues created by relocating existing process tools. It all boiled down to what Torrice called “Alpha's three commandments: safety, production, construction.”

“Essentially, what Alpha did was grow their business in the same box,” Mahoney says. “The three commandments became the theme song, and they did not want any safety issues coming up. They wanted to fulfill orders and find creative ways to complete the construction.”

Torrice and Mahoney agree that perhaps the most significant project accomplishments were designing and installing a temporary 2,000-ton chiller plant and shutting down and upgrading the existing chill-water plant. That task was completed in a surprising 30 hours.

At the time of this report, finishing touches were still being made to the cleanrooms at Alpha. When the project is complete, Alpha will have a 6,600-square-foot Class 100 cleanroom for photolithography; a Class 1,000 cleanroom for backside processing; a 3,000-square-foot Class 10,000 cleanroom for its scribe/probe room; and a 1,200-square-foot gowning room.

Mahoney offers this advice to those faced with managing a cleanroom upgrade and expansion: “Cleanroom class needs to be well defined beforehand. Don't guess. Take the time to find out, and there are definitely several pieces of the puzzle. Remember: the tool defines the room.”

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