The air in the cleanroom is the purest you’ve ever breathed. It’s class 10 purity, meaning that for every cubic foot of air there can be no more than 10 particles larger than half a micron, which is about the size of a small bacteria. In an exceptionally clean hospital OR, there can be as many as 10,000 bacteria-size particles without creating any special risk of infection. In the outside world, there are about 3 million.
The cleanroom is nearly silent except for the low hum of the “tools,” as Intel calls them, which look like giant copy machines and cost as much as $50 million each. They sit on steel pedestals that are attached to the building’s frame, so that no vibrations—from other tools, for instance, or from your footfalls—will affect the chips. You step softly even so. Some of these tools are so precise they can be controlled to within half a nanometer, the width of two silicon atoms.
It’s surprisingly dark, too. For decades, Intel’s cleanrooms have been lit like darkrooms, bathed in a deep, low yellow.
BusinessWeek

5000th post!
This blog was born on March 7, 2005. Facebook had a different name then. The social network had 3 million, mostly casual users. Today it counts over 1.6 billion. No one had heard of the iPhone. The Google Car. Uber. Or Amazon Web Services.
It has been an amazing run over the last 11 years. And innovation keeps accelerating. This is what Florence must have felt like during the European Renaissance.
And the innovation is spreading globally. Search the blog and you find entries on Rwanda, Kazakhstan, Antarctica and plenty more places off the innovation beaten path.
The blog has influenced 4 of my books. It has helped many of my consulting clients as I “raise the bar” for what they can expect from technology
I am grateful to my sponsors for their continued support. I am thankful to many friends who send me story ideas for posts. And especially thankful to readers who have made this blog part of their regular diet.
Here’s to the next 5000 posts!
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June 30, 2016 in Industry Commentary | Permalink | Comments (0)