Inside the World of Ultra-Clean Chip Manufacturing.
The Institute of Microelectronics of Barcelona hosts the largest clean room in southern Europe, where researchers develop micro- and nanotechnology. The clean room is a controlled environment where pollutants are filtered out. The air in this part of the clean room is 10,000 times cleaner than normal air. Researchers have developed a way to make chips tiny enough to enter living cells, which can be used to identify and track living cells and to find alternatives to chemotherapy and other treatments that are too aggressive for the human body.