WaferTech’s chips off the old blocks
Saturday, April 26, 2008
By COURTNEY SHERWOOD, Columbian Staff WriterWaferTech employees work with the microscopic every day. On Thursday the small things drawing the Camas company’s attention were children, not integrated circuits.
The semiconductor manufacturer hosted about 150 young visitors for Take Your Child to Work Day.
Kids donned clean-room gowns like many of their parents wear each day.
The gowns, nicknamed “bunny suits” because of their appearance, keep hair, skin cells and other tiny particles from drifting off workers’ clothes and corrupting the computer chips that WaferTech makes.
The business, which employs about 1,000 people, plays a crucial role in the manufacture of computer chips. WaferTech buys 8-inch silicon wafers, which look like thin, perfectly round mirrors. It imprints the wafers with circuits for hundreds of microchips in a grid across the disk.
Other manufacturers then cut each chip out of the wafers and package them for use in cell phones, cars, medical devices, or wherever it may be bound.
Children learned about semiconductors and the chip-making process and toured the 1-million-square-foot plant, one of the largest of its kind in the United States.
“It is wonderful to see busy kids having fun and learning,” said Maria Petruzelli de Sanchez, who heads the WaferTech employee event committee. | 
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