Chris Anderson
NEW YORK—Cleanroom managers from all industries have a new resource to help train new and existing employees with the November release of William “Bill” Whyte's Cleanroom Technology—Fundamentals of Design, Testing and Operation, a follow-up to his book Cleanroom Design, which has sold more than 9,000 copies worldwide.
“This book is important for a couple of reasons,” says Chuck Berndt, principal of C.W. Berndt Associates, a cleanroom consulting company based in Highland Park, IL. “First, there is very little information readily available on many of the topics in the book, such as human source contamination, and what is known is fragmented among many different sources. Cleanroom Technology provides the one resource people can refer to for comprehensive information on cleanroom operation.”
And that's exactly what Whyte, a professor at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, had in mind when he set out to write the book. “Much of the information available now focuses on different industries and the specific cleanroom operations at a pharmaceutical company and semiconductor manufacturer can vary greatly,” says Whyte. “This book is intended to be a general reference guide and training resource for anyone needing more information about how to run a cleanroom.”
Organized as a textbook, Whyte hopes in time to see the book used both on university campuses, private training organizations and individual companies as a means of providing the basic training in cleanroom operations that so many workers new to the industry currently lack.
Whyte says he set out to make the book accessible to these fledgling cleanroom workers. He uses a step-by-step approach that starts with the history of cleanrooms, touches upon various cleanroom standards, progresses to how to design, test and run cleanrooms and ends with a chapter on how to clean a cleanroom.
“It is intended to be an easy read, but it still presents the information needed,” says Whyte. “When you are writing a book like this you have to start at the bottom and bring the reader along slowly.”
Berndt says he anticipates that the book could become as “important” as Whyte's 1999 second-edition release Cleanroom Design. “We've already recommended it to a couple of our clients to get them up to speed on the issues,” says Berndt. “In fact, it is more inclusive and up-to-date than the first book, so we think it will do even better than the first one has.”
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Cleanroom Technology sells for $69.95.