Before you can enter the clean room at Meridian Wafer, you must first become as clean as a person reasonably can. There is a changing area, then an air shower, then a long bench where visitors are helped into white hooded suits, overshoes, two pairs of gloves and a mask. By the time I stepped through the final airlock, I had lost all sense of my own shape. Everyone around me looked identical, distinguishable only by their eyes and the way they walked.
Meridian occupies a low, unremarkable building on the northern outskirts of Dresden, a city whose history in electronics stretches back well before reunification. The company is not a household name, and prefers it that way. It does not make the enormous, cutting-edge processors that dominate headlines. Instead it produces specialist chips in modest volumes: sensors for hearing aids, radiation-hardened parts for satellites, and analogue circuits prized by makers of expensive audio equipment.
Plant director Friederike Hasselmann likes to compare the business to a small vineyard rather than a mass-market brewery. Her clients need chips that are extraordinarily reliable rather than extraordinarily fast, often in quantities too small to interest the giant foundries of Asia and America. A single production run might yield a few thousand wafers, each a disc of polished silicon carrying hundreds of identical circuits, destined for devices that must work flawlessly for twenty years.
Light, patience and yellow rooms
Inside, the clean room is bathed in a soft amber light, filtered to protect the photosensitive chemicals used to print circuits onto silicon. Machines the size of shipping containers hum in orderly rows, each performing one of the several hundred steps a wafer passes through on its way to completion. The process can take three months. Technicians move between the machines with unhurried care, carrying wafers in sealed pods, and the atmosphere is closer to a monastery than a factory.
People think of chips as anonymous commodities. Each of these wafers has a biography. We know every hour of its life. — Friederike Hasselmann
Europe's anxiety about dependence on distant suppliers has made foundries like Meridian unexpectedly strategic. Politicians now visit regularly, and the company recently received public funds to expand its capacity. Hasselmann welcomes the investment but is wary of the rhetoric. Building a semiconductor industry, she points out, is less about money than about people: engineers, chemists and technicians who take years to train and cannot be conjured into existence by a subsidy.
To that end, Meridian runs an apprenticeship programme with local technical colleges, and the clean room is noticeably young. Emre Kaya, a twenty-four-year-old process technician, joined straight from school and now oversees one of the lithography lines. He speaks about the work with evident pride, and with a craftsman's vocabulary of feel and judgment that sits oddly, at first, with the extreme automation around him. The machines are precise, he says, but somebody still has to notice when something is wrong.
Back in the changing room, peeling off my layers, I asked Hasselmann what she would want readers to understand about her industry. She thought for a long moment. Then she held up a finished wafer in its clear case, turning it so that the light broke across its surface in bands of violet, green and gold. Everything you own that thinks, she said, began as something like this, in a room like that, made by people like them.
