Elon Musk recently shook up the cleanroom world during an interview, saying, “I think they’re getting cleanrooms wrong in these modern fabs”.
The Tesla CEO promised that the company will build its own 2‑nanometer process fab, a facility it does not yet have, highlighting its interest in pushing the boundaries.
Musk added that once Tesla builds a 2 nm-capable chip factory, he’d happily eat a cheeseburger and smoke a cigar inside the facility.
Taken literally, that sounds impossible as eating and smoking inside a semiconductor fab would immediately contaminate the ultra-clean air required for nanoscale manufacturing.
But Musk’s comments raise the question of whether new technologies reduce the need for massive, energy-intensive cleanrooms.
Role of cleanrooms in chip production
For decades, semiconductor fabs have relied on large ISO‑classified cleanrooms with sophisticated airflow, filtration and pressurisation systems.
These environments protect wafers through hundreds of processing steps, from photolithography and etching to deposition.
Even invisible dust can ruin an entire wafer, making stable air purity and environmental control essential for producing cutting-edge integrated circuits.
By keeping contamination in check, fabs can maximise production yields, minimise costly defects, and ensure every chip meets the highest standards of reliability and safety.
Effective cleanroom layout and design minimise contamination risk and help ensure smooth workflows through critical stages, while temperature and humidity control support the physical and electrical integrity of delicate semiconductor materials.
Wafer containment over room control
In his remarks, Musk emphasises that wafers themselves must remain isolated and contamination-free, rather than the surrounding room.
Musk envisions wafers sealed or contained in ways that make the larger environment less critical.
Many fabs already move wafers in sealed carriers like Front Opening Unified Pods (FOUPs), but Musk’s idea goes further: could advanced wafer encapsulation and micro-environment technologies allow more of the fab, including areas with human operators, to operate under less stringent conditions?
Micro‑environments for wafer encapsulation
Next-generation fabs are experimenting with wafer-level containment and micro-environments.
Sealed wafer carriers, tool-specific enclosures, and localised airflow systems ensure critical processes remain protected without requiring an entire building to meet the strictest cleanroom standards.
Automation and AI are accelerating this trend, enabling real-time adjustments, predictive contamination control, and smarter optimisation of micro-environments, which drives both innovation and efficiency in wafer production.
In a less extreme example, many manufacturers are also moving toward modular or hybrid cleanroom designs, where multiple cleanliness zones coexist under one roof.
Flexible walls, scalable HVAC, and real-time monitoring allow facilities to target environmental control where it matters most, reducing energy use and enabling quicker reconfigurations.
Emerging technologies to strengthen containment
Beyond structural solutions, new materials and automation further enhance cleanliness:
- Self-cleaning coatings, advanced HEPA/ULPA filters, and nanomaterial surfaces improve contamination resistance.
- Sensors, AI-driven monitoring, and automated material handling reduce human exposure in sensitive zones.
- Robotics, which do not shed skin or fibers, can operate in high-risk areas, further isolating wafers.
These innovations improve efficiency and reliability, but they do not replace cleanrooms entirely.
For leading-edge processes, wafers remain extremely sensitive to contamination, requiring at least localised cleanroom-level protection.
Why “dirty fabs” might be further away than you think
The concept of dirty fabs, or operating semiconductor facilities under less stringent overall cleanroom conditions, reflects Musk’s idea of isolating wafers instead of the entire environment.
While wafer encapsulation and micro-environments can reduce the footprint of ultra-clean areas, cleanrooms remain essential.
Even tiny particles, temperature fluctuations, or humidity changes can ruin chips, and atomic-scale tolerances leave no room for error.
It is estimated that for every one square foot of wafer production cleanroom space, roughly 50 square feet of infrastructure is needed to support it.
Micro-environments alone cannot replicate this comprehensive protection.
Emerging technologies, such as wafer encapsulation, localised micro-environments, modular cleanrooms, smart monitoring, and advanced airflow, won’t eliminate cleanrooms entirely.
However, they could reduce reliance on massive, energy-intensive facilities.
Future fabs are being designed to be more flexible, efficient, and cost-effective, and traditional cleanrooms continue to safeguard the atomic-scale precision modern chips require.
Time will tell if Tesla will follow through on its fab promise, and with that, the boundaries of wafer-level isolation and cleanroom design.