Yesterday I went to the College of Nanoscale Engineering of the University of Albany, State University of New York (which, for the sake of brevity and sanity, I will call CNSE). There I visited CNSE, SEMATECH, IBM, TEL, and a number of other organizations in the same building that required separate badges and sign-ins. All of these groups have at least one thing in common: entering requires one to go past giant, larger-than-life posters of President Obama.

It seems that last year the President paid a visit to CNSE and got a tour of the clean room. And since the one thing that CNSE does even better than nanoscale engineering is public relations, I guess the bragging with giant posters was inevitable. Still, I thought it was very cool to see people I know (hi, Warren!) pointing out lithography tools to the President. As I stared with wonder upon my arrival, slowly an odd sensation crept over me – something was wrong, out of place. Then I realized, the President was not in a bunny suit, or wearing any clean-room garb at all (not even safety glasses!). Neither was Governor Cuomo. And neither were the engineers in the pictures with them, though they certainly knew better.

Clean room garments are necessary to protect the pristine cleanliness of our wafers and equipment from the inherent dirtiness of our human bodies. But it gets worse. As expected, security for a Presidential visit is quite strict. A thorough sweep of the clean room was carried out by numerous secret service agents, including bomb sniffing dogs. That’s right, dogs roaming the clean room! The sticky mats at the entry ways between rooms were covered with dog hair. And it turns out that many process chemicals used in semiconductor manufacturing smell just like bomb-making materials. The dogs went crazy. The agents were nervous. Some equipment had to be dismantled.

I suppose when the support for your lab relies almost entirely on government funding, the inconvenience of dirtying your clean room is a small price to pay for the publicity of a Presidential visit. It took about one month for defect levels in the clean room to get back to pre-visit levels. That’s a big interruption in work schedule. But at least they have some cool posters to show for it.