Happy to answer questions, there are a couple of errors and misspeaks. Note I'm not in that field anymore (and,thankfully, I'm in much better physical shape).
I uploaded it at the time as I wanted to subtitle this for my deaf (and also non English speaker) teacher, but I lost the password for that YouTube account mid progress. Maybe I should try to reset it.
Thank you!
1) thank you for the effort to make cons more inclusive
2) would love to help...would having the slides help?
Right now, finishing up a PhD in engineering education where I study the development of engineering students' beliefs about knowledge and how those interact with their development of entrepreneurial competence.
Plus most of those guys work 3/4 12hr shifts a week...great schedule. No work goes home with you.
Each is different...a college degree will never hurt and a master's is pretty normal for fab engineers and a PhD for process developers.
As for schools it definitely depends in a similar way, but most top technical schools will get you recruited. A standout is Rochester institute of technology which has an undergrad degree in microelectronics.
Now I'm working for a tech company in Taiwan, who do the next process step: dicing the wafers into individuals dies, and packaging the dies into chips. There's a trolley downstairs with over 1 petabyte - stacked high with trays of 16GB memory cards from the testing machine.
Unfortunately I only managed to get a job writing monitoring software, equipment control drivers, and business planning software, so I don't get to handle the wafers myself.
In my opinion, you'll need to learn Chinese if you want to work for the lithography companies, or work for the German/Japanese/Swiss companies making the machines that take in the FOUPs. If you want to simply be a technician, most of the migrant workers who operate the machines here come from the Philippines and get paid very little while working very long hours with no path to promotion (all the line managers are Taiwanese). On the bright side though, the technicians speak better English, so it's easier to talk to them directly!
I enjoyed the circuit design/FPGA programming courses in university, but the projects to design ASICs usually take several years, so I couldn't get work experience thorough summer jobs (which is how I ended up in software).
What I remember from class is that it's a fan on the roof, blowing air through a very fine filter.
The most magic part for me is that this still works even though the PM2.5 pollution outside is terrible (the AQI is over 150 today, which causes me to sneeze and get red eyes, and is known to increase the risk of cancer, so everyone wears dust masks outside).
Most cleanrooms are now class 10 (meaning 10 half micron sized particles per square meter) compared to a class 1,000 operating room. The wafers are all sealed in the 'clearnoom within the cleanroom' spaces of tools and FOUPS.
I have heard of fabs having problems fro msources as strange as nearby farms and earthquakes half way around the world. The filtering (ultra-HEPA filters) will absolutely clear up your alergies almost over night.
Also you mentioned a background in metrology. How do you inspect something a few atoms thick?
A bunch of different ways. Depends on the material being measured but measuring sheet resistance (effectively, you can back calculate the thickness by measuring the resistance of a square of known size) and light scattering off the surface are the most common.