1988 · Multi-Chamber Cluster Tool · Work 878 of 1,871
A wafer processing machine in a clean room of a chip factory in California, a box-shaped cabinet of off-white panels one metre sixty-five high and one metre ninety wide, in its front a large upright window of near-black glass, behind it in faint blue light a hexagonal chamber where a flat robot arm carries a round wafer twenty centimetres across into a side chamber, beside the window a narrow blue strip with a small red light and four plain round buttons, a worker in a white clean-room suit seen from behind with a gloved hand at the cassette port, perforated floor tiles, amber light far behind.
What it was used for
Applied Materials' Precision 5000 was a multi-chamber chipmaking system that ran several process steps in sequence, with a robot arm passing the wafer between chambers. Applied Materials itself states: "In 1987, Applied Materials shipped the first Precision 5000 CVD (chemical vapor deposition) system." The example in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, object 1992.0449.01, made in 1988, consists of a metal frame with a plastic window and 3 process chambers around a central robot arm; by the museum's acquisition documentation it was designed for low-pressure reactive ion etching of submicron features and took wafers up to 20 centimetres in diameter, processed individually in several chambers at once.
What was new
By chiphistory.org the Precision 5000 was designed as a four-chamber platform with an automatic port at each chamber, and was the first multi-process platform system to run several processes in sequence well enough for manufacturing - something other companies had tried and failed to build. The barb: a machine that grouped several chambers around one robot arm became, on the same page's account, the maker's gold standard and the model for later platform designs across the industry, and Applied Materials points out that it was inducted into the Smithsonian Institution's "Information Age" exhibit.