June 7, 2021
MIT.nano staff have recently received some questions about cleanroom notebooks entering and leaving the cleanroom.
We suggest keeping lab notebooks inside the cleanroom. Bringing the notebook outside the cleanroom exposes it to particles, not just on the cover (which can be wiped down), but also the individual pages that cannot be wiped down (especially if the notebook is opened or used outside). Here are a few options:
- Never use the notebook outside, and get a cubby to store it with your samples;
- Never use the notebook outside, but use a plastic bag to keep it outside, therefore the notebook never sees anything but cleanroom air (this is not a recommended option);
- Don’t use a notebook, but instead keep notes on loose sheets of the blue cleanroom paper (stocked in the gowning room), which you then bring out at the end of the day (and don’t need to bring back in);
- Use CORAL as your notebook/record keeping system. If you enter tool-run conditions (e.g. wafer numbers, recipe parameters, etc) in the “comments” field, you get a nice record that you can easily look at in the CORAL reporting: nanolms.mit.edu/reporting/jsp/requestHistoryMember.jsp. (There is also a “lot” feature in CORAL to help when running multiple projects, e.g. I used to organize my lots to have “litho testing” vs. “device fabrication,” which made it easier to drill down into individual lots (see nanolms.mit.edu/reporting/jsp/requestHistoryLot.jsp)
- Remote desktop or Google drive into your computer, and keep notes there.