March 2010 Survey

Survey introduction

The March 2010 survey was the second survey carried out using a format where individual cleanroom users were asked about their view on various parts of using DTU Danchip's facilities and in particular the cleanroom facilities.
The questionaire was send to 120 registered users (based on the logging of cleanroom use) unfortunately 3 of the e-mail adresses were obsolete and thus the mails bounced, which brought the total number of potential answers to 117. In total 29 persons answered the questionaire which means an answer fraction of 25% or 24% (depending on whether or not the bounces should be included in the total).
This page deals with the comments given as part of the questionaire. Danchip values this feedback highly.

Comments

The comments appear here as they were written in the feedback field of the questionaire. In a few cases they have been anonymized or the worst spelling mistakes corrected.

Comment 1

Måske i kunne sende ud på cleanroom users mail listen, om der er noget af personalet der er væk i dag. Så man ved det inden man går over og leder efter dem

Action:
Danchip comments: We agree that having an overview of the Danchip staff would be useful information for our customers. We have therefore decided to implement a system giving this information to our customers – the first step is to find a suitable system sharing this information. As soon as the system is up running all our customers will be informed.

Comment 2

More storage room would be appreaciated

Action: Planning steps to make more shelf space active
Danchip comments: As Danchip sees the matter there is a need for space for placing work in progress. From our point of view a lot of the shelf space in the cleanroom is just used for passive storage. This is not what we want because it clutters the cleanroom and adds to the particle count in the cleanroom. What we will be doing in the future is to make some storage space available in the basement and take initiatives to make the shelves in the cleanroom more active. The way we approach this is that as soon as we know the proper way to register the shelves we will be charging for the rent of shelves on a monthly basis (650 kr per month per shelf meter). We hope that this will help encourage users to remove boxes which do not contain work in progress.

Comment 3

I would like to add that the cleanroom technicians are very good at informing about expected downtime of specific equipment

Danchip comments: Thank you.

Comment 4

This seems to be an unfortunate time to ask for this survey. The EVG NIL has been down several times in the last few weeks. The E-beam writer is out of action for an extended period.

Action:
Danchip comments: Regarding the EVG NIL, we are a bit confused about this. According to our status log last time the machine was down was 2/2-3/2. If possible we would very much like to hear more about these break-downs and find out why they are not recollected in the status log. Regarding the E-beam writer, we had the (planned) annual service from Feb 26th to March 5th. Unfortunately, the gun was damaged by the JEOL service engineer meaning that the instrument only could be used with a beam spot size of 50 nm until the e-gun was replaced. This replacement was done 15/3-22/3 - in our opinion a very fast gun change under these circumstances (not planned gun change). Of course any down-time on this machine (where we do not have internal back-up) is annoying, but we believe that the response time in this particular case was very fast.

Comment 5

It would be nice if there were always disposable pipettes available in the yellow room

Action: Check current procedures
Danchip comments: Yes there should. Danchip will review our procedure for maintaing a reasonable stock of pipettes in the yellow room.

Comment 6

Generally things are fine, but there is a disproportionate amount of bad luck in Danchip.

Action:
Danchip comments: Alas, Fortuna is not with us all the time but we don't think that we are especially unlucky. Given the boundary condtitions that we have 140 pieces of equipment used by 250 people for very different purposes it happens that things break down. The most annoying for us and for you is the long lead time on spare parts or external service engineers. This is among other things a matter of price. We simply cannot afford to buy equipment and service contracts with guaranteed repair within 24h like the semiconductor industry does (prices for that are astronomical). When we buy equipment it is a compromise between versatility, price, anticipated usage and total cost of ownership. We try to provide you with a comprehensive portfolio of processing possibilities for the money that we have at our disposal. Still we try to drag Fortuna on our side and have taken measures like preventive maintenance and a small stock of spare parts here and there.

Comment 7

Most of the equipment that I am using is having somewhat varying performance. The danchip staff has help a lot, but I am still loosing a lot of time on redoing stuff due to humidity, gas and other problems.

Action: Investigation of each and every incident to gather knowledge to perform better in the future
Danchip comments: This has definately been a problematic period. We are adressing the humidity issue with a 'quick fix' until the system is renovated over summer. The gasses have been problematic mainly due to the large number of machines going into the cleanroom. In a number of situations the way Danchip has handled it has not been in a manner we are proud of. We will continuosly evaluate all incidents and learn from them what we can in order to perform even better in the future. Regarding the humidity problems we have ordered a complete renewal of the humidity and de-humidity system and it will hopefully take place during this summer. Please note that it is not a simple matter to humidifie a cleanroom like Danchip, the old part alone consumes 260 liter DIW pr. hour

Comment 8

The "unsatisfied" of the cleanroom conditions derives mainly from the III-V part. A lot of people is using it as the "dirty" part and that is not a good practice. Also, the Eppendorf pipettes that are there should be taken more care of.

Danchip comments: The III-V parts should definately not be considered "dirty" - in fact the devices processed in the III-V lab are among the devices with the highest requirements on cleanliness. Due to historical reasons the III-V spinner has been used for a variety of jobs, however other spinners (SSE Maximus and Polymer spinner) should be used instead.

Comment 9

It would be useful to have these kind of pipettes [Eppendorf-red.] also for other spinners and/or processes.

Action: On wish list
Danchip comments: The Eppendorf pipettes are acknowledged to be extremely useful for handling small amounts of photoresist. They do however need a lot of care and attention if they are to perform well. At the moment the wish has been added to a wishlist of things we will look into on a bit longer timescale.

Comment 10

I think the survey is missing something between satisfied and unsatisfied. I cannot say I am unsatisfied with any of the items, but I will also say that satisfied is a strong word for some.

Action: No action
Danchip comments: It is a deliberate choice to leave out the 'neutral' answer in the middle. Your feedback has been received, but at the moment it will not lead to any changes in the questionaire.

Comment 11

Regarding the helpfulness of the staff, I will say that all Danhip personnel is very helpful when it comes to small problems in the cleanroom with a machine or a process but if there is a persistent problem it is often less easy to get help on a long term basis.

Action: No action
Danchip comments: This is quite unfortunate. Danchip does strive to assist on all the timescales and sizes of problems that we can. You are always welcome to drop by the offices of Jörg Hübner, Flemmening Jensen or Anders Jorgensen should you have any kind of comment or issue you wish to bring up. You are also welcome to send a mail to the "Suggestion@danchip.dtu.dk" and then your question/comment/suggestion will be received by a wider group of people.

Comment 12

Most of technicians come early and leave early. Sometimes it is difficult to get help after 15:00.

Action: No action
Danchip comments: Yes it is correct that most technicians come early and leave early. This is not a deliberate choice from Danchip's management's side but we do se a couple of positive outcomes of the present situation: 1. We are better able to do service and maintenance when there are few users. 2. The Danchip employees work flexible hours and that gives a higher job satisfaction.

Comment 13

New terminals: On one hand it is very nice that we can log on to the WIN domain and have access to our network drives for note taking, data collection, etc. On the other hand it makes it very cumbersome to fill out the different log books, log on to equipment, etc. as it takes around 15-20 sec to log on to a terminal and further log on to labmanager or find a logbook. It was much faster when there were just laptops standing around, always with a browser and logbook open.

Action:
Danchip comments: JHUB

Comment 14

It is impossible to comment on the two first items - the answer would be different for each piece of equipment in Danchip.

Action: No action
Danchip comments: Your comment has been received. We have deliberately chosen to keep the number of questions in the questionaire low. This does mean that we loose detail but hopefully people will add a comment if they feel that something should be improved.

Comment 15

When you send out a notification that the cleanroom is closed for a certain time (e.g. the recent gas line updates), it is important that you open the cleanroom at the given time, or at least that you send a timely update that the work is delayed, and you have a new expected opening time.

Action:
Danchip comments: You are absolutely right, this information should be accurate and timely, Your comments have been brought up at a service meeting and hopefully we will improve on this.

Comment 16

We get lots of e-mail stating that some piece of equipment is ready for use. Unfortunately, we never get e-mails when the equipment goes out of use - a piece of information which is at least as valuable for the users although it might not be as pleasant for Danchip. Also, the "Descriptions" given when the equipments get "ready for use" are most often complete nonsense and/or useless. Here is an example.
---
The status of PECVD1 has been changed to "Ready to use" with the description:

ready

Reported by:
XXX
---
It does not tell me anything about, what XXX did, or what was wrong in the first place. If we should get any mails, when the equipment changes status, we should get e-mails every time it changes status. Or even better, it should be possible to choose in labmanager, which notifications, you want to receive. Even better yet would be, if you automatically got notifications for equipment, where you have future bookings but not otherwise.

Action:
Danchip comments: About emails, when the labmanger system was first introduced we discussed this issue and concluded that the information on “out of use” equipment should be communicated to the users through the front page of labmanger and not by email. The thought behind this is that users will log on to labmanager when they are about to start or plan there work and there they will have a complete view of machine status. The “Ready to use” email was thought to be a service to the users, so they don’t need to log on to labmanager several times a day to see if needed equipment is up again.

About status messages, the general rule is that any info important for the users should be available in the status log of the equipment. Sometimes there is no fault on the equipment but the error was coursed by misuse or operator faults, this information is between Danchip and costumer only and therefore we might not flag this to everyone unless we think it is educational.

Comment 17

Another thing that does not really fit anywhere else - There is no unique ID for each piece of equipment. For instance; we were looking in labmanager and saw that a spin dryer was out of use. However, even with the help of Yvonne, we were not able to identify which spin dryer, it was. Each machine should have a unique ID written on the machine, and it should be written in labmanager as well.

Action:
Danchip comments: We are working on a cleanroom map with equipment and room names. ID plates on the equipment will follow when the map is done and locations in labmanager is going to be changed as well.

Comment 18

It would be beneficial, if there was a computer screen next to each machine that just showed its status in labmanager (ready, limited use or out of use). It would save us all from lots of nasty surprises.

Action:
Danchip comments: We try to minimise the no. of computers in the cleanroom because they are dust traps and take up a lot of space. Thank you for the comment but I do not think we will proceed with this.

Comment 19

Big need for a SEM outside of the cleanroom!!!

Action: Disussing further with the current occupier of the room where the SEM will be located
Danchip comments: Danchip fully acknowledges this request. We are actually uin the situation that we have a spare SEM and we also know where it will be placed. The problem is that at the moment the room is occupied by a DTU department. We are trying to see if we can reach a useable solution with them, beacuse we also want the SEM up and running.

Comment 20

I have hard time to fill the form - I cannot give general statements. There are pieces of equipment that I am very satisfied with and some staff that is excellent and some that are not! This means that "No opinion" means I cannot generalize. If this was anonymous I would be happy to provide details.

Action: No action
Danchip comments: Thank you for your feedback. Danchip has choosen the "identifiable" format deliberately, we have found that it makes it much easier to discuss specific details of certain feedback comment if we actually know who to talk to. We have choosen to keep the number of questions down which leads to more general categories but we have valued the low time needed for answering higher than the additional information which could be gained from more detailed questions.