- Since 1967, CEA-Leti,
here in Grenoble, in the south-east of France,
has been one of the world's largest research hubs
for electronics and nanotechnology.
And by the mid-2000s, the folks here had a problem.
They had two clean rooms,
two carefully controlled spaces with purified air
where research and testing could be done
without any dust or contaminants getting in the way.
But those two clean rooms were 250 meters apart
on opposite sides of a road,
which is the kind of thing that happens
when your campus steadily grows over decades.
So every time some tiny component or piece of equipment
needed to be moved from one to the other,
it had to be put in sterile packaging.
Then, the researchers would have to leave the clean room,
take off all their gowns, and gloves, and shoe covers,
walk over, put on a whole new set of protective gear,
clean off the packaging,
and then finally go in and unpack it.
And you can see the solution.
They built the world's cleanest people mover,
a clean room on wheels
that can somehow dock and undock to the main buildings
without letting any outside air in.
And we're going for a ride.
- The clean room is about 11,000m².
Today at Leti, we have about 2,000 employees,
and 800 of them are focusing on fabrication.
We are making devices, from components to sensors,
and we are mixing a wide variety of technologies,
including lasers, quantum technologies.
We are able to print circuits
down to the 10-nanometer nodes.
This is a device that you will find in your phone
or in drones and specific systems.
To speak about the dimension,
we said that the thickness of one hair is about 50 micron.
So when we discuss a transistor with a dimension of 10 nanometers,
it's about 5,000 times smaller than the hair.
And the risk is that when one hair is dropping on the surface,
that, of course, the circuit won't operate.
- All of the horrible human stuff
is sealed inside many layers.
Let's go ride a people mover.
- We have to operate in a very clean environment
since the source of contamination is us.
So basically, we have to wear special clothes
to protect the wafers, and the dies, and the circuits,
and the nanotransistors from us.
- Obvious question, why not just build a corridor?
Well, they did think about it,
but that's a colossal amount of space
that would have to be filled with ventilation
and air treatment equipment all the way along,
all constantly running and maintained at huge expense.
Also, they were worried about how people would feel
walking down an isolated, empty, narrow,
sealed-in 250-meter corridor with no doors
where you can't see the other end
because it needs steps in the middle to get over the road.
Not great.
[sliding door clicking]
Oh, there's the buttons!
Someone should probably join me in here!
- How clean is the clean room?
I would say compared to the hospital and the surgical theater,
the surgical theater has probably 100 times
more particles in the air.
And I would say that the house
has probably 1 million times more particles in the air.
We can see these bigger gray pipes, and this is the way
that we are operating the recirculation of the air
from the top to the basement through the clean rooms.
- I should point out,
there's three or four people crowded behind the camera here.
I'm not being allowed in the clean room funicular on my own.
Here we go.
And this is a clean room.
The air is still being circulated
just as it was in each of the buildings.
The concrete supports that we're traveling over,
and all the powered systems
that are hauling the cables that are moving us are,
well, they're not off the shelf,
but they are about as standard as you can get
for something like this.
They're manufactured by a company called Poma
who make all sorts of ropeways.
For this clean room that sits on the top,
well, making this work was up to the folks from the CEA.
- So in the clean room, we have a special team,
which take care of the cleaning of the surfaces
and make sure that no particles are stuck.
We have to clean the shuttle as well.
So the cleaning team is also operating within the shuttle.
- The problem is that this has to dock
and undock from the clean rooms.
How does dust and outside air not get inside?
The cabin slows down a lot at the end of its run,
and that's because it has to position itself
extremely carefully, millimeter-accurate,
to make sure the rubber seal on this door
matches up with the rubber seal
on the door of the clean room.
They get connected.
And then high-pressure air blasts out anything in between.
All the outside atmosphere is exhausted by fresh, clean air.
And this whole system, the people mover and the clean room,
is kept at slightly higher pressure than the outside.
So if there ever is a leak, it's only going to leak outwards.
- When you enter the shuttle, the door will close
and then you have to wait for maybe 30 seconds
before there is a higher pressure inside.
And then at the end, we have the same operation.
It's to depressurize the shuttle to allow the door to open
and the operator to move in the next clean room facility.
- So why not just let people keep walking over
the old-fashioned way?
Well, before this was installed, the researchers here estimated
that transporting stuff between the two rooms
was so inefficient that it lost the time equivalent
of seven or eight full-time jobs.
And rebuilding the clean rooms would cost far, far more.
This might seem a bit unnecessary at first,
but out of everything,
it's probably the least expensive option.
And I am not allowed through this door.
I can't do the walk off into the distance!
I'm not allowed through this, my badge doesn't let me.
We go back!
Let's go back.