The INQ guide to spilling a drink in a fab

WHAT DO YOU do when you spill your drink? Get a napkin, and wipe it up. What do you do when you are in a sub-micron fab and spill your drink?

Hint: Napkins have lots of lint and lint floating around a clean room is bad. Enter Kimberly-Clark and their Kimtech Pure brand of fab wipes.

Now these are not your normal nasal debris acquisition and removal devices, oh no, those would basically kill a fab as soon as you pulled one out of the box to help with that post-nasal drip. These are almost completely lint-free wipes, and come in 4 level, CL3-CL6.

The models correspond to the ISO class off the clean room they are good for CL3 is CLass 3, and CL6 is for CLass 6, get it? The lower you go, the less absorbent, but also the lower lint, so you probably want to use the highest level that makes sense.

The CL3 variants are made from polyester and are bright white, just like your best Sunday suit. As you go down the line it goes through a range of materials and ends up with a cellulose/polyester mix at CL6.

Next time you are building a fab in the backyard to compliment the fallout shelter and almost done UFO landing pad and welcoming center, you know what brand of wipes to get. They sell for between $18 and $35 for a pack of 100, so they aren't exactly cheap, but if you need them, you need them. You can also get them pre-saturated with alcohol, no bad pun needed. µ