Displaying items by tag: design

As computer and electronics industries pack more circuits on semiconductor wafers, eliminating particles in the clean rooms where they are processed becomes more critical with each generation. In many wafer-processing environments, as well as in other clean rooms, mechanicalpositioning stages are large contributors to contamination. Sup-pliers are required to follow special design criteria that ensures a positioning stage's cleanliness according to certain standards.

Microbial control is critical in cleanroom environments. Contaminated environments can lead to product recalls, regulatory observations, fines, or even consumer deaths. In order to properly prevent, destroy, and monitor microbial contamination in cleanrooms, several aspects of cleanroom microbiology must be understood. This foundational introduction to cleanroom microbiology discusses some of those aspects.

Despite all many studies claiming raised floor is no longer necessary in data center design, it is still present in the vast majority of data centers or computer rooms. We are going to address several important factors to consider (structural strength, airflow and leakage if you’re using it for cooling and static dissipation) when choosing and installing a raised floor in your critical facilities.

An integral part of scientific research, yield optimisation, safety assurance and quality control, cleanroom installation is an increasingly important feature within the manufacturing process.

The biggest source of contaminants in any industry is air. In order to minimize the amount of particles floating around, production processes are moved to a cleanroom.

Perhaps the popular view of a cleanroom is as a stark, cold antechamber where brave biocontainment specialists don slightly trimmed versions of spacesuits and battle novel pathogens threatening to escape clandestine BSL-4 facilities. In the movies, and sometimes in real life, that may be true. However, cleanrooms pervade research, testing, and industrial facilities, with prominent roles in pharmaceutical and semiconductor manufacturing, food safety, immunosensitive research and clinical care, and mobile or temporary applications that require pop-up and tear-down capabilities. Consequently, they run the gamut from moderately restrictive additions within permissive facilities, to isolated and sterile environments that function like giant, single-purpose biosafety cabinets.

A cleanroom (GMP cleanroom), in my mind, is a combination of engineering design, fabrication, finish and operational controls (control strategy) that are required to convert a “normal” room to a “clean room”. This blog will attempt to explain the necessary characteristics of a regulated company clean room not producing potent chemicals or active or hazardous biologicals. If there are significant containment requirements, the requirements would be outside the scope of a “simplistic” blog like this. In a pharmaceutical sense, clean rooms are those rooms that meet the code of GMP requirements as defined in the sterile code of GMP, i.e. Annex 1 of both the EU and PIC/S Guides to GMP and other standards and guidance as required by local health authorities.

We starts with your process requirements and your business objectives. We then design and construct your cleanroom- based on your budget- from that foundation. Our in-house engineering, design, construction management and project management teams enable us to bring constructability and tool requirements into the cleanroom design flow.

Due to the sensitive nature of their products, clean room facilities for microelectronic and semiconductor applications require stringent environmental controls. These clean rooms also house extremely precise and expensive equipment such as photolithography, etching, cleaning, doping, and dicing machines. Hence, any deficiencies in the cleanliness specifications can affect the entire production process. Other common issues in microelectronic & semiconductor clean room conception and design are the maximizing of space while also enabling future reconfiguration. For all these reasons, a modular clean room system is often the optimal solution.

Often people have a budgetary price for their cleanroom project without much understanding about their needs. A cleanroom is an investment and can be a real asset to a company’s strategy, therefore the build and design should be well thought through.