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New filtration media, technologies, and airflow design strategies are helping users of critical environments improve filtration efficiency and control costs in the face of tightening air-quality tolerances. Click here to enlarge image By Bruce FlickingerThere was a time that, if critical environment operators wanted to ensure the air in the facility met or exceeded accepted standards of cleanliness, they simply increased filtration efficiency and pumped up the volume of air…

Cleanroom owners industrywide look to shrink expenses while battling high utility bills and the lure of cheap foreign labor By Sarah Fister Gale With energy costs nearly double what they were a few years ago, along with a steady stream of cleanroom production business-particularly in the microelectronics industry-being shipped over seas, the trends in cleanroom design for 2006 are far from the exciting technological revolutions that they’ve been in previous…

Each month, CleanRooms brings you innovative products of interest to you and your industry. As we reach the end of 2004, we've compiled this complete collection of the products we've featured over the past year. From apparel to wafer sorters, you'll find it here in “Products of the Year.” Quiet efficiency Click here to enlarge image A comprehensive line of AC and brushless DC (electronically commutated) fan filter units are…

Compared to fab expansion via new cleanroom construction, a SMIF upgrade may prove to be the lowest risk with the shortest time to project completion By Chris Humphreys & S. Peter Hansen With the semiconductor industry upturns and downturns occurring more frequently, capacity planning becomes a difficult task. Greenfield expansions can take 18 months or more to put capacity in place, and fab expansions can take up to 12 months.…

For some time now we've been concerned about energy conservation in semiconductor manufacturing cleanrooms. Papers have been written, seminars have been conducted, consultants have proliferated and engineers have gone back to drawing boards where they've produced solutions-some quite innovative and others rather exotic. by Mike Fitzpatrick Click here to enlarge image We have even reduced the airflow in our cleanrooms, taking our most widely used process fluid-clean air-and diminished its…