Article

Advance, a Marketable Product

Index

The longer article is based on what I've learned in 35 years on all sides of the table in this business. First as a contractor, then as a consulting engineer for many industrial manufacturing and engineering firms' nation wide. Then watching marketing, other engineering executives, and top management people in many different situations.

This material is presented here for those new to the profession, or and to those who may find it entertaining.

10 ways to boost sales

...and profits, for your firm and the client.

1. Realize that it is within your power as an engineering services firm, or individual, to give your client a competitive advantage by providing a state of the art, or better, facility. Point this out to the client.
2. Realize that advance may not be an option, but a necessity in an ever more competitive world. Point this out to your staff, and to the client.
3. Do not sell a system, or building design that just meets code… sell an advance, across the boards. And not just better, but better than the best in every detail. More efficient, lower cost, better construction logistics, and by the widest possible margin. Let this be reflected in your firms graphics package.
4. The customer thinks he wants lower priced services, so he can have a better bottom line. Point out that his bottom line depends on advanced facilities, facilities that can double profitability. This is *the key factor in profitability. Low grade systems mitigate against profitability. Study the clients issues in this regard, in detail, know what advances are possible, know them better than your brightest client, cross pollinate from other industries, then sell the advances.
5. Gear up for quality, this means research, rewarding those who improve their skills, present to the client with a totally exceptional team. And do it like the Oakland Raiders did….in-house, with very regular, but exceptionally well motivated people.
6. The immediate future is characterized by full access to the latest information, and competition from those with no overhead. The new competition is from overseas by tele-commute at $3/hour…. Many major US firms are subcontracting work at these rates. Understand that your team will have to be more than slightly exceptional to survive the this competition.
7. It’s a new world every 6 months now. Structure your company, and your clients systems for that rate of change, and build contingency into your projects. Sell those logistics, and features.
8. Have integrity. Your customer is not the young man, with 2 years experience, the client has assigned to oversee the job. The client is the corporation, or business owner, for whom one is doing the work….. In the final analysis it is that client who must be satisfied, who will steer you more work if the project is exemplary. Not the person assigned to sign your weekly billings. I have seen firms, ruin major projects, and loose tens of millions of dollars in engineering contracts, because they operated on the basis that the person signing the orders was 'always right'.
9. Treat everyone like a king. Spend a little money on the staff. Then expect the very best, in this way you will build a quality team, mutual respect, and competence. The error I have seen, is in not expecting, and demanding peak performance…. But instead hiring the best looking resumes. No one survives in the major leagues that way. Performance at peak levels should be the operative criteria for staffing. One weak link in an operation, even one incompetent draftsman in a key position, can affect an entire project.

Very Best Regards,

Philip E Scott

Copyright, Philip E Scott, 1/1999, all rights reserved

Selling Advanced Level Services

15 key points:

1. The efficiency, attractiveness, and technical advance of your clients manufacturing process or facility will determine that client's success or failure in business.

Most corporate managements are not aware of all of the engineering issues, so delegate these decisions to the engineering departments, who are not aware, it seems, of the larger business and world competitive issues…. in most cases.

Accordingly engineering services are put out to bid then on the basis of cost, delivery time, with the only questions, will it meet code and 'work'. The larger issues are seldom even recognized. Engineering firms who do not recognize these issues, end up working….inexpensively.

This article addresses these and a few other issues, and points to a successful method of resolving them, getting more clients, delivering real value, and at a better profit margin.

Answer: A lower price, schmooze, and faster service. That’s it. Beating a price is not that difficult, so a firm had better be world class at providing service, at rock bottom price ranges, and schmooze……lest not to offend the client who has searched and found ones firm to be one of the cheapest alternatives available.

It appears at that point it is a bit late for the posturing, wouldn't you say?

This is not the path personal happiness and prosperity.

3. The immediate future

This situation will only get worse as the world gears up to do business over the internet. As things stand today, many of ones competitors are bidding projects substantially below usual costs, hiring a few well spoken American engineers and managers to do the client contact, and then sub contracting the design, engineering and drafting work to Russians, Indians or people in other nations who telecommute the work at $2.00 an hour.

4. A look at what drives the market for professional engineering service.

The combination of demands for a lower price, and faster service, drive engineering firm profits down. Many of those seeking 'engineering services', do so as they would shop for lawn mowing services, thinking apparently that all service is more or less equal, except for price and delivery…… and furthermore, that if the service proves unsatisfactory, they can just switch vendors.

Not so with brain surgery or engineering services in the industrial arena at least.…..the client gets to live or die with the mistakes, or the lack of insight, or the use of obsolete tactics. ( The issue of a firm who opts to simply provide designs to meet the building code! Is not addressed here, one hopes however than an educated professional would be able to find more meaningful work.)

Corporate bidding practices and policy also have not recognized or defined 'advance' into the service category, just price and speed of delivery. So that becomes what is put out to bid. The tactic has done three things for engineering firms:

1. It has driven profits and salaries down, and real talent out of the engineering business. A skilled and established mechanical contractor for instance, generally bids his time at $1,000 a day or more in certain cases… sometimes double or triple that amount. (regardless the advertised rate), and pays his men at the $70,000 to $80,000 a year level.. Overtime can run those figures up substantially. It is not uncommon to see competent engineers with 6 years of college, a high grade point average, and 20 years experience working for significantly less than a union plumber, and as often as not, working for less than a building operating engineer with a high school diploma.
2. It has allowed the focus of attention to go onto, price, and engineering as a commodity, not as an opportunity to advance a firms competitive standing.
3. It has driven away talent. Real talent demands creative, advanced level work. If your firm provides drudgery on a shingle, with a deadline, it will not attract or retain real talent. Without talent, as the world becomes more competitive, a firm does not stand much chance of significant success….. a fighting survival maybe, but no joy, no real success.

Note: One reason many firms wish not to pay for anything more than minimal code compliance level work is they think their in house staff has already done the research and specified an adequate 'advance' into the project description, so do not wish in that case to pay for it twice. And the point is often well taken. Indeed the customer in very many cases is vastly more able to define and develop advance than its selected engineering firm. However this need not be the case. And when a firm can demonstrate advance beyond what the client has in mind, then the door is opened for a much better relationship. These points are addressed more fully in the balance of this article.

As an engineering firm shows the client how the quality and costs of production, are a direct result of the quality of engineering, and that this will determine the success or failure of the operation, the client becomes more interested in quality service, and the overall bottom line, than just cost of engineering services, often less than 5 or 10% of a project.

It is not difficult to do a cost / benefits analysis of faster, higher yield production VS costs of a better manufacturing process or facility system.. Generally the better manufacturing process has two benefits. Higher profits for the manufacturer, and an advantage in the market place.

As a manufacturer's cost's come down, its competitors must compete at that level, or go out of business. Many of course fail to compete each year, and go out of business. For manufacturing firms, and even some retail firms, it is the systems engineering, behind the scenes that provides, or fails to provide, the critical advantage.

A few examples:

1. If a shopping centers parking lot doesn't drain water well, business all but dies in wet weather, while shoppers get familiar with another shopping center, that ends up getting their business even in good weather….. a similar situation exists with the architecture of the place, the air conditioning, even how the restrooms are designed.

2. If a semi conductor plants yield rate is 75% it must sell it's product for at least 25% more than a company who's yield rate is 95%….as semi conductors become a commodity, we see the high cost producers going out of that business.

That’s a heavy price to pay for mediocre engineering, but its paid almost daily by many companies who hire on price alone, and do not seek advanced systems and logistics…….services many engineering firms are not even staffed to handle, due to a practice of hiring at the lowest rates possible.

The difference in facilities may be simply that the high yield company had the foresight to provide space for electronic prefilters, reducing the particle count in their clean rooms, to exceed industry standards at the time the clean room was built. Or in the case of the shopping center, if the civil engineer had used his head, and gone with one size of drain piping up, from what some rote calculation indicated might work, or what was called out as a minimum in the UBC, and the architect had asked, how can I make the restrooms an attraction, instead of wasted retail space…. Things would have been different you see. The shopping center would have had a fighting chance.

All this, can be done by an engineering firm in the same, or less time in some cases, than a rote, unthinking engineering job.

And that may be a key point of this article. Providing minimal service, will turn a firm, and its staff into bottom feeders.

6. There are prerequisites to high level performance.

There must be more than just an attitude towards advance, but intellect, study, experience and integrity behind that attitude… and these characteristics must be firmly rooted with the company management and senior level engineering and marketing teams.

Cost of additional engineering to provide the advances mentioned in the above examples, almost nothing, cost of the electronic filters is 1% of increased profits due to higher yield rates in a single month!. Result for the client: 10 to 20% more profit per item than his competitor, and a doubling of sales figures beginning on the day the competitor goes out of business.

These issues however are often not addressed at the upper management levels of a corporation. Instead these are left to the engineering department for a decision. However as many who read this will realize, the engineering department is, as often as not, completely unaware of the business and economic considerations, world competitive situations, and the down line process technology, to make a good decision in many cases..

So price becomes the issue, and both the client firm, and the engineering firm, loose.

In the long run, we all loose when an American firm becomes less competitive, entire industries have been forfeited in this fashion.

7. What to do when the customer's Harvard Engineering School graduate, with two years of experience, knows best.

Please have your throwing tomato's ready. I am going to speak heresy now. I am going to say that if you actually operate on the basis that the customer knows best, when the customer is certifiably in error, the rocket is quite likely to blow up on the launch pad.

Integrity is not an option when it comes do doing high quality work, one had better not fail to correct the young man….. in one way or another. and one had better not take his direction. If you think catering to this person's error pleases the company's board of directors, I'd suggest you ask them personally, and get to the real crux of the issue. The board of directors will tell you, in no uncertain terms, that you should not apply the 'golden rule of business' in this case…. And that they the board of directors, and the stock holders are the customer, and the customer wants the job done right.

By catering to a company employee, one is NOT making the customer right…. One has simply misdefined the customer, as an excuse to cater to ignorance for short term gain, at the expense of all concerned.

They will tell you that you were hired to do a professional job, with the best interests of your client in mind, not kiss the posterior portions of anyone's anatomy.

I’d agree entirely, and suggest that if you have done your homework, you should be able to educate the young man politely and effectively, with a cc to his senior, and save both the project, the companies viability, and your firms integrity. Lacking this integrity from the original engineering firms on a project, I have been retained to bail out these projects, after failures had almost ruined the corporation.

These managements, after the fact, were emphatically not impressed with the application of the lame credo, 'The customer is always right'…. And the engineering firms involved lost all future business from these corporations, ended up with a black eye in the industry, and lost millions of dollars of future business, all the result of catering to ignorance. This is the credo required of the mediocre, so as not to offend anyone.

At the top levels of a successful company, this is not the effective way to conduct business. And if it is the way the business operates at the top, I'd suggest one find another client.

8. How does one manage to sell this higher level engineering service?

First the firm must have something of intellectual quality and integrity to sell, then that becomes the obvious and visible character of the company. Only at that point, will a client see the fruits of the exceptional insight, and the list of advanced projects, research, and recognize, and pay, for that level of service.

One raises the issue of research early with a client.

Research is the key to advance. In the medical and engineering professions, these seem to be left to the universities and private industry for the most part... Only from there do the results of that research filter back to the practicing professional, if he or she has time to read the research, or even trade journal summaries of it. Most it seems, do not.

This works well enough for many commercial applications…. and often poorly for industrial and process engineering. The larger engineering firms of course know this well. They develop and maintain advanced research departments, often in conjunction with their larger clients. The chemical and petrochemical process industries are the best examples. Many develop and sell the patented processes as a package with the engineering services required to build a facility…..a very profitable pass time.

Most engineering firms however do not maintain any semblance a research division, and are apparently not aware of the potential in working with a client on research, and sharing the benefits there of. The client gets a state of the art advance, and a competitive advantage, often a completely industry dominating advantage, and the engineering firm gets a patented process or system to sell, a happy client, and recognition for excellence in the industry, all of which drives new clients more interested in quality than price to his offices.

Firms without this research capability or even an intent to read up on an industry and practices, prior to doing the engineering work, end up with very little to offer, save low prices, and a promise to print the drawings out on expensive paper. These must sell their services in the price competitive markets.

1. An engineering firm must shift its emphasis from designing to simply meet minimum code requirements, to offering options and designing systems that give the client an advantage in the market place. Or a system that can be built less expensively than other options, and last longer. Ideally a system would meet all these criteria.
2. Secondly the engineering firm must staff to that level....Hiring drafting team, for instance, that has just finished a CAD course, and can make lines on paper, and an engineering team with a civil background from Greenland, or engineers with just a few years experience, and limited expertise, to run a sophisticated mechanical project, will get the following mediocre marginally profitable results as a rule.

• The engineering will be a cloned design from a vendors manual, at best workably applied.
• The draftsmen will have to be coached to draw almost every line, and place every note…. A near total waste of both engineering and drafting time, that will drive the engineering costs off the chart, and result in the most unremarkable work imaginable. Hiring at low hourly rates does not solve the problem, managing, hiring and culturing quality, and paying a quality rate, but only for advanced performance, does solve the problem.
• Extensive reviews and revisions will be required, as there insufficient understanding of the system and construction requirements, and how these fit with other trades, the firms business and production processes.
• The clients contractor will bid the job, then go waive the drawings at the owner, pointing our your shortcomings, and demanding huge extra's to fix the project. ( In most cases the specialty contractors, some with hundreds of man years experience in their specialty, know a lot more about the engineering of a system that the professional engineering firms staff who may see that specialty only once a year.
• Your firm will be bidding another project, and looking for the cheapest plumbing draftsman you can find, because the job was so low in order to get it. Low quality creates a vicious cycle.

It seems that in order to produce an advanced product, one does then need to have a company wide policy to produce leading edge engineering, and be willing to staff to that level. This means hiring the best, and often the highest paid engineers and draftsmen one can find…..not the cheapest.

10. The intangible issues

If your firm is 'thinking in a box'…..that is presenting without adequate insight, or research or experience, and trying to make it appear that you do have these, when in fact your firm does not….or you have the experience, but none of it is advance type work. Your client will pick up on that, consciously, or subconsciously. You will not be able to sell a project much above the lowest going rate in these circumstances.

If you have done the research, ongoing for years in many different areas, and are looking to the broader issues, the clients world wide competitive requirements, the dynamics of that industry, etc. Then the customer will be looking at these issues also. Its as simple as that. I guess one could say that real competence, breeds real confidence, and when you say then that a good engineering job will require some research and development of the issues, you firm will be paid for that service.

11. Some projects lead to more and bigger projects, others are just headaches

If you want the project on profitable terms, and you want a completed project that can showcase your company's capability, and you want a client who will tell the world what a great job you did…… just being the lowest bidder will not achieve those ends.

Ask a client to fill you in on the project. First a written report. Some sketches, a walk through. Then have a meeting……. Get everyone involved, as many hidden players as possible need to be there, or at least named. A copy of the client firm's organizational chart is useful in this regard….you can ask at the meeting , "what does the VP of marketing think about this situation".

Get all the data. Probe for all of the considerations involved in the decisions to go forward with a project.

Then investigate the industry, talk to vendors who sell to these people, survey the equipment operators many of whom have worked for many different companies. Probe until you fully understand the issues. The client's competitive issues, the marketing issues, the technical issues, etc. Now you are ready to help the client with a plant or process design. There is almost a 100% chance that the basis on which the project has been decided on is not entirely sound. The costs have been grossly underestimated, the competitions current approach is not often well known, and the competitions plans are often totally unknown…… yet these bear heavily on the viability of the current project.

If you wish to differentiate your offerings from those of the lower priced engineering firm, this apparently is what it takes.

12. Differentiation:

It’s the oldest of marketing tools, yet it seems many engineering firms are so focused on the technology, or the politics or the day to day management, that they fail to use these basic approaches to differentiate themselves from the competition and sell a value added product (at a value added price).

I will just list a few of the more common value added deliverables here:

• Negotiate purchase for the client below wholesale.
• Segment the project to fit a logistics plan for accomplishing the job.
• Provide project management or project oversight to keep the logistical targets in.
• Research the industry and supply your findings to the client.
• Research the equipment and configuration options and supply your findings to the client.
• Provide a construction logistics plan that will greatly reduce construction costs.
• Engineer as many systems as possible so they can be build modularly, off site, in parallel with field construction, reducing construction time, field labor and risks.
• Instruct your staff, and management never to lie to a client, no matter what the circumstances.
• Instruct your staff to do all of their homework before advising a client, no matter how hard the client or a representative press's them for a response.
• Involve a professional contractor as a consultant in advising you on probable job site conditions and issues, so that the engineering and project logistics can be done with these accounted for.

These and other value added services make a job a complete package, reduce or eliminate surprises, and work that ends up at counter purposes. This strategy can reduce overall project costs significantly, and all but eliminate cost overruns, some times in the 100 to 200% range, not a minor issue.

When a client sees a truly complete engineering package like this, with total project costs for less money than a less well engineered and coordinated project, he or she will gladly pay you an extra 5% of the job for engineering. (that increases the engineering fee by 50%, or so however). This is called, delivering a value added product.

You will need to hire first class management and engineering talent to pull this off though…… two guys from Greenland and a drafter from St. Petersburg are not going to be able to do this quality of work.

13.   How to provide advance, lower costs, and gain a significant sales advantage.

A tall order, but it is possible. ...summarize briefly:

1. Hire the very best you can find.
2. Tell them to spend their time finding an advanced approach, ( a refinement on existing approaches is safest… or looking at other industries to see how they have solved similar problems…then combining the insights.).
3. Tell these engineers that in order to achieve an advance, one must learn a lot about the context in which their systems operate…… so they must subscribe to the other disciplines trade journals, and read them religiously, for starters. There are many other things that need to be done as well.
4. After all this, tell the engineers that the designs must still be as simple to purchase and install, and operate as possible.
5. Proof the design, examine every worst case scenario. Make sure your design will succeed in each, or specifically write performance out of the contract in these cases, and fully inform the client.
6. Now, have the engineer lay out the CAD drawings, sheet numbering, plan layouts, main header locations, etc.
7. Turn the job over to a competent CAD draftsmen who has a large library of detail blocks he can use to flesh the construction drawings out.
8. Detail ONLY critical items, do not detail the rest of the work, issue a standard set of specifications to cover these issues. This leaves the contractor with the responsibility to install the job per spec. and not able to point to conflicts or omissions in details to get extra's.
   This is stage one of the selling advance, and profitability….both for your firm, and importantly the client company.
   
   The second stage is educating your client that all design service is not equal, and that his or her firms success depends largely in many cases on the efficiency and competitiveness of its facilities, and that the engineering of these facilities and systems is crucial to achieving that end.
   
9. This is where the talent comes in. If the engineering staff is not multi disciplined, and not well read and experienced in the broader range of the clients industry and process, he or she will not be able to come up with, describe, or do a cost benefit analysis required to show the client why he should deal with our firm in the first place. So your firm needs to both culture, and hire, people who are seeking and operating on these leading edges of advance.
   
   If you have draftsmen who do not wish to progress to higher levels of systems design or even engineering, you have not hired an individual who will help your firm advance.
   If your firm hires engineers who have not studied outside of their discipline, and who cannot perform outside of their discipline, then you have hired engineers who do not understand the context in which their own designs operate….. an these will not provide an advance for your firm or the client company either.
   If you firm has management that nit-picks and focus's on code issues exclusively, how the drawings are to be numbered, and when everyone arrives for work, and never on achieving a superior design for the client, or an advantage the client can benefit from to be more competitive in his industry…..well then you have a management without a clue as to what the real competitive issues are in the world. A manager who will hire the cheapest, and deliver legal, but mediocre or worse engineering, saleable only at rock bottom prices.

14.    Successful actions

Hire, reward, and retain those demonstrating by their product, results, actions, and intellect an advanced mind set. These people don't 'drone' too well, treat them accordingly. Expect the world, demand better than the best, but let them telecommute at will, and save 2 hours a day in traffic. Arrange office hours to fit flexible schedules. Provide a quiet space so they can work without distraction. And above all, you be truly interested in advance, and able to recognize it, and ask for it, and demand it, and sell it to a client.

Then, with all this in place, you will have advanced level services to sell a client that help him succeed across all categories of the bottom line.

Philip E Scott

Semi Conductor Facilities

Since the early 80's, Mr. Scott has been senior mechanical or project engineer on many semi conductor fabrication facilities,  for National Semi Conductor, AMD, IBM, Monolithic Memories, Intel and many other firms in Silicone Valley as chief engineer for A and A Mechanical. 1989 a study, analysis and remedial recommendations of the new IBM RISC chip facility in Burlington Vt. 1995- 1998, many projects for Texas Instruments in Dallas and other sites around the world detailed on resume, and client list. Clean rooms, UHP piping, Liquid Nitrogen, Acid exhausts, labs, tool hook up, and extensive project management services.  He has written the following out line of what he sees as key facilities engineering issues.

Regionally, there have been different approaches taken in building these facilities.

On the west coast a service tunnel design seems to be predominant. This has the advantage of placing vacuum pumps and the like in sight of tooling. It tends to cramp and limit equipment space however, this can severely restrict fab operations and breaks up the floor space with service aisles, one gets less fab space per acre of land with this strategy.

In Texas, and many Asian countries, a stacked approach is most common, with the piping and process support equipment in the basement, the fab on the first floor, the air handling , duct work and small volume specialty scrubbers on the third floor, with the fourth floor used for employee support areas, and offices. Primary scrubbed exhaust systems on the roof or at ground level to the side of the building. This leaves an open 'ballroom' where equipment can be placed to both optimize production, and to allow ease of maintenance, and refitting the fab for new production.

And on the east coast one sees mostly a mix, the fab and service tunnels on the first floor, and a second floor for air handling equipment, but that is changing, lately, as fabs get larger, there is a trend to the stacked configuration world wide.

Trends:

Building Configuration:

The latest advance is to a stack on an open grid structural concrete waffle. This leaves the entire area below the raised floor wide open for piping, wiring and duct runs. It also makes the inevitable and extensive retooling much faster and less expensive. See photo's attached.

The earliest stacked configuration in the United states is the 'South Building' at Texas Instruments site in Dallas, with 12 feet floor to bottom of waffle grid (closed waffle)….. this was suitable when this facility was built in 1965, today more floor to ceiling clearance is required. The latest stacks are 20 feet floor to bottom of waffle and in many case the waffle is open. ( 6'open waffle between columns on 30' centers).

The floor over the fab of course must be solid. Some facilities provide lift out panels, 10' x 10', in the main aisle areas so that if necessary large tooling can be placed into a fab through the ceiling. This also allows for a ceiling air plenum space eliminating then need to duct each HEPA filter module.

The primary error one sees today is lack of a comprehensive plan for hierarchical arrangement of the various utilities through out the facility. Seldom is adequate room allowed to parallel existing utilities as new services are required. Lack of such a plan results in the trades making expedient decisions. This can make a facility extremely difficult to retrofit later. (see photo's of well designed utilities in open waffle configuration)

Raised flooring:

The old standard, 12" to 18" has proven marginal at best in today's fabs, unless an open waffle is used to support the raised floor. Over a solid floor I recommend 24", with an assigned hierarchy for electrical, cabling, 25 different piped utilities, and 4different ducted utilities. This approach will reduce construction costs considerably and make retrofit and retooling much more viable. With a ceiling height of 12 to 14' or more in new fabs to accommodate the larger tooling, and 3' minimum air plenum space we get a minimum floor to bottom of beam space of 20', which is becoming fairly common.

HVAC

Destructive particles are introduced several ways, by humans, equipment, process water and fluids, and from the outside air.

The bulk enter through the make up air system, air required to replace what exhaust hoods take out is a considerable, hundreds of thousands of cubic feet a minute in many cases. The HVAC system must reduce this particulate to almost zero…..99.9999% free of particles above 0.5 microns in diameter.

There are several problems in this regard. While 99.9999% is pretty clean, it is still ONLY a percentage number. If for instance, there were 1,000,000 particles per cubic foot in the outside air, 0.5% or larger, then 99.9999% efficient filtration would still leave 10 to 100 particles per cubic foot in the supply air to the clean room, border line for a class 100 clean room, and considering particle generation inside a clean room, not sufficient for a class 10 clean room by any standard.

And this has been the situation in all too many fabs today.

When the weather turns dusty, or at peak traffic hours particle counts rise dramatically, the straight HEPA, or ULPA filter approach becomes entirely insufficient, yield rates are reduced dramatically in these circumstances.

There are many factors. Carbon particles for instance will go through a mechanical, or charged filter much more readily than say dust or pollen will…. That is because the carbon atom with a valence of 4 is relatively stable and does not attract or hold a static charge well. So it goes right through a filter. This combined with the fact that much air born carbon is atomically disbursed, means a lot of carbon gets through the filter over a years time. This carbon then tends to plate out on surfaces where it agglomerates into larger particles, that when dislodged can contaminate a process.

Solutions:

Prefiltration with adhesive coated fiberglass, and or automatic wash down electronic filters is a good step towards reducing particle counts. It prolongs the life of the HEPA filters in the process. These measures however do not retrofit well, and should be designed into a new facility from the start, or at least provision made for prefiltration from the start, then if it is needed later, it can be viably added.

The open ballroom, running at class 10 to class 100 levels (at 0.5 microns) with closed process tunnels, or microenvironments is also viable. This approach has the advantage that no people are in the final process environment, a significant advantage, and the wave of the future, this can achieve class 1 to 10 levels at 0.12 microns. (below 0.12 particle counting is difficult, and the particles tend to flow like gasses, that is evenly disperse in a space, even against air flow)

The Future

With line widths approaching a few gold atoms, and many layered VLSI scale semi conductors, screens and devices, even particles as small as 0.12 microns will become a serious problem. The degree to which a company can control particles in this range will determine its success into the next century.

Open ballroom fabs, with an open waffle under the raised floor, and sealed processing tunnel environments, will be the wave of the future. Companies that build fabs to accommodate this approach will do well , those who do not will be slow to adapt, and be required to build new fabs instead of retrofit existing ones as process technology changes.

Designing a Fab to Accommodate Retrofit

As mentioned earlier, the open waffle, stacked design, is most amenable to fast and efficient retooling operations. Additionally with this layout, and with micro environments in place, retooling can take place while the rest of the fab is in production in many cases…….a very important issue.

There are many other design considerations in this area. Bearing strength of floors, vibration transmission, ambient noise (now and projected), and foundation issues to mention a few. All of these must be taken into account when designing an optimum fab building that one hopes will be useful over the next 5 to 10 years and longer, as chip geometry gets progressively tighter.

De Ionized water

Generically the problems are similar to make up air, as ambient conditions change, so do the cleaning tactics and requirements. This can become quite complex.

Beyond this issue is the choice of materials, piping loop, purge strategies, and polishing system configurations. Among the senior issues are:

1. A cleanable system. While a hydrogen peroxide flush will get rid of bacterial plaques to suitable levels in most of today's fabs, it will not prove satisfactory as the semi conductors become smaller. Hot water purges will be required.
   
   Hot water cleaning has been determined to be the best, especially in combination with hydrogen peroxide. The problem with hot water cleaning is the preferred piping material, PVDF, has a very high coefficient of expansion. This means a pipe length will change several inches on short runs and a foot or more on longer runs when heated. If the pipe loops and supports are not designed to accommodate this expansion the system cannot be viably cleaned with hot water. (Only hot water with hydrogen peroxide above 190 degrees F reliably kills the current strains of bacteria). Most PVDF systems built today, cannot be hot water cleaned…and will have to be replaced at great expense, as cleaner process water is required…. Gold plated stainless steel is an option, but it brings its own unique set of problems.

2. Piping configuration is the subject of many proprietary company standards. I am not able to discuss them here beyond what is published in the trade journals. Suffice it to say that not every DI water rated component or pipe material is compatible with the highest levels of water purity. Some leach boron, and a range of other contaminants, into the water to levels exceeding several parts per billion. With DI water, the issues are almost endless.

There is much written on these and other issues, high and ultra high purity gas piping, double contained acid piping, acid, toxic and silane exhaust systems etc. I have just touched on a few of the key issues here.

As good as current practices are, the fact remains that these systems will be grossly unsatisfactory for the next generation of semi conductor manufacturing process's…. And this situation should be a great concern to any company building a fab today.

Construction

Firms that use in house directed construction methods, and a high percentage of directly hired construction staff and foremen, tend to get their clean room facilities built for substantially less money, and less risk of cost over run, than firms who put the project out to bid. This package of materials includes notes on this approach. Also available by email, on request, is an article written for CE Weekly Magazine a few years back on the subject "How fail and what you can do about it.". This article has received wide acclaim, the approach has been successfully used in projects nation wide.

Summary

I recommend that a company hire the most qualified and experienced semi conductor facility engineers and consultants, allow a significant excess of fab and equipment space in the original design, and then design for ease of access, retrofit, and expansion….. this way, as processes and systems become obsolete, they can be more easily replaced or upgraded without having to build a new facility.

Philip E Scott

copyright 1/1999 all rights reserved

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