Definition: clean room

A room in which the air is highly filtered in order to keep out impurities. Chip fabrication plants use clean rooms where the air is completely exchanged as many as seven times per minute. Such facilities are said to be as much as a thousand times cleaner than a hospital operating room.

Workers go through an elaborate procedure to gown themselves in the "bunny suits" that are required to keep them from contaminating the atmosphere. Clean rooms are also used in the manufacture of hard disks, and they keep the environment free of infectious bacteria and viruses in the biotech industry. See also clean room technique.

All Suited Up

After gowning up at Microchip's manufacturing facility in Tempe, Arizona, Alan Freedman, author of this encyclopedia, and public relations specialist Christie Haber, were taken on a tour in 2019. See Microchip Technology.