She has one of the most important jobs in the world, but most people outside the Idaho factory where she works have never even heard of what she does.
Briena Hall, 29, is one of a relatively small number of elite engineers trained to maintain and operate extreme ultraviolet lithography machines. This machine is a highly complex device known as EUV, which creates the microchips that iPhones, computers, televisions, cars, and more rely on.
“I thought I had the coolest job ever,” Hall told The Wall Street Journal.
“I didn't grasp the fact that this work is necessary for our entire world to exist the way it does,” she added.
Hall, who calls himself a “flashy mechanic,” is a customer support engineer at ASML, the company that invented EUV and is the only Dutch company currently manufacturing it. The business relies on her and around 10,000 similarly trained colleagues to maintain all of the hundreds of EUVs that manufacture microchips around the world.
The machine, about the size of a bus, is something out of science fiction and creates microchips by vaporizing droplets of molten tin and blasting away the metal with an ultraviolet laser, leaving a trace of the chip pattern on a silicon wafer. Create.
This process occurs 50,000 times per second, creating chips that are 10,000 times finer than the width of a human hair.
The Journal also says it uses a mirror so perfectly finished that if it were blown up to the size of Germany, the largest defect would be less than a millimeter. And their lasers are accurate enough to fire ping pong balls onto the moon's surface.
Of the hundreds of EUVs in existence, only six companies have their own EUVs. The rest of the world relies on ASML to make chips.
That's where Hall, who works at ASML's Boise plant, comes in.
Hall, who graduated from Washington State University with a double major in engineering and materials science, got the job after a professor passed her resume to ASML and the company contacted her to apply.
Hall had never heard of ASML or EUV, but was intrigued when she was told the extensive training would take her all over the world.
She first traveled to Taiwan to learn about EUV's 100,000 parts for a month, then was shipped to Germany and San Francisco for months at a time until she finished her entry-level training.
Then, after another year of apprenticeship, she was allowed to work on EUV independently.
When Hall entered the EUV room, where the air was 100 times cleaner than a hospital operating room, the first thing he did was decontaminate it so as not to change the exact conditions the machine needed to operate correctly. He had to wear a full body suit.
“Everything has to be perfect,” Hall told the Journal. “For her to work, the conditions have to be exactly like that.”
The equipment can be affected by earthquakes and other impacts, and one equipment failure was even caused by methane gas emitted by cows on an upwind dairy farm.
Hall is the type of person whose job it is to analyze machine problems, find their causes, and monitor the machines daily to make sure no other problems arise.
She works 12-hour shifts and tries to use the restroom as little as possible to keep the machine room clean from people coming and going.
“I space out and limit sips of water. And I don't drink coffee,” she said.
She enjoys the intensity of the job.
“When I'm using a tool to solve a problem, everything else seems to fall silent. I'm just focused on getting that one thing done,” Hall says. Masu.
“There's nothing better than focusing on a problem until it's solved.”
But despite EUV's great complexity, Hall believes it is easier than humans to tackle it.
“Our machine is so complex that it has a personality, but it's still a machine. If you press the right button, she appears. You just need to understand which button to press. It can be solved . We can solve it,” she said.
“Humans are far more complex than any machine I know.”
