How Clean Is Your Clean Room?

Most of us have heard of the concept of the clean room. We know it s supposed to be a sterile environment where nothing gets in. We assume its so that covert top secret stuff like inventing super killer diseases for World War 3 can take place. We probably associate clean rooms with government bunkers and secret agent safe houses that have something of everything in them, including an arms cache big enough to take down a small European country and with enough money to build it back up again. Then again perhaps I watch too many action movies.
Clean rooms are in fact quite innocuous. They are not the scene of high action, high adrenaline, world saving, red or blue wire cutting, torn vest hero wearing places that we think they are (by which time they have ceased to be clean at all). They do play a very important life saving role, however, when it comes to data recovery after you have accidentally formatted your hard drive and wiped out all your bosses holiday photos. Then the old adrenaline is definitely pumping as you anxiously await some good news.
Clean rooms are all about controlling the surrounding environment and its variables. They control elements such as temperature, humidity, airborne contaminates and light, all of which are harmful during the manufacturing and repairing of sensitive electronic components. The clean room must be perfectly sealed, absolutely nothing must be able to get in, an example from one website includes volatiles from adhesives . If you know what volatiles from adhesives are, then you are smarter than I am. I would guess you know what, I m not even going to hazard a guess. The same site also warns against particulate matter . What on this blessed earth is particulate matter? Whatever it is, you don t want it in a clean room, so it goes under the label bad . But, if by some accident (heaven forbid) some particulate matter or even worse, some volatiles from adhesives manage to get into the clean room, heavy duty air management equipment and filtration systems should be able to sort the situation out in no time. These machines help to maintain the positive air pressure, which is essential for the close tolerance mechanisms that are found inside storage media.
These filtration systems and air management equipment as well as all the other gadgets and machines that keep a clean room clean and running smoothly must be constantly monitored and maintained in order to meet the standard requirements. There are various classes of requirements and for a class 100 certification there must be 750 particles per cube foot that measure 0.2mm. Again I do not know what that means. I just hope that it means something to the people who are supposed to know.
A clean room is therefore more complicated than vacuum cleaning and dusting once a week. That might suffice for your room, or you could just have curled your toes and gone, eeuw, once a week, what kind of slum do you live in? But a clean room needs something a little bit more, shall we say, zealous or particular. It actually does need floors that are clean enough to eat off of, although goodness knows how many microbes are on the food that you eat and are therefore barred from the clean room s sterile environment. Its surfaces need to be cleaner than merely clean enough to pass the finger test. And it s not good enough to only rinse the cutlery because it s just you and you only stirred a cup of tea with it anyway.
If you use the finger test, if you reuse teaspoons after a quick rinse and if you vacuum and dust sporadically then perhaps working in a clean room is not for you. Sterile environments and you are probably not the best work mates. This is not a judgement. I do all of the above. I could never work in a clean room. I would drop an instrument on the floor, pick it up, wipe it on my sterile pants and carry on. I might even blow on it before I wipe it. That s probably not standard operating procedure. You need to have a special respect for clean to work in a clean room, or special respect for machines. Maybe one breeds the other. All I know is my clean room would fall way below par.



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