Keeping Your Class 100 Fab Actually Clean
In a Class 100 environment, there’s no such thing as “a little bit of dust.” One stray particle or a whiff of chemical outgassing and your whole batch is toast. Most heating elements are a nightmare here—they shed particles or leak VOCs the second they start warming up. That’s why we went with high-purity synthetic quartz for our infrared lamps. It just makes more sense.
Why the quartz matters
We use fused silica with almost zero impurities. Why? Because low-grade glass “sheds.” It flakes. Our lamps don’t. They work using short-wave infrared radiation. Instead of heating up the air around the part, the energy goes straight into the workpiece. This is a huge deal because it stops those annoying convection currents from swirling around and kicking up dust from the floor. The quartz shell is chemically inert, too. It won’t react with the air or leak junk into your fab line. We also keep the seal-off process incredibly tight so you don’t have to worry about internal halogen gases escaping while the lamp cycles through temperatures.
The trade-offs (and how to handle them)
These lamps are built for speed. We packed a lot of wattage into a small footprint, so you can hit your target temps in seconds. If you’re working with wafers or high-end optics, that kind of precision is a lifesaver. But here’s the catch: they runhot. If your housing isn’t built to handle that kind of thermal load, you’re going to have problems. You might warp a nearby plastic part or trip your cooling system. Just make sure your airflow is balanced. You want to keep the lamp’s electronics cool without messing up the ambient temperature of the cleanroom.
Getting them up and running
We designed these to be simple drop-in replacements. No fancy gymnastics required to get them into your existing gear. And because we know how annoying residues are, we strip and clean the leads to remove every trace of manufacturing oil before they leave our shop. You can just wire them up and get straight to work. No need to spend hours on a pre-bake cycle just to clear out the gunk.