On the 27th in the afternoon, KidZania Seoul in Songpa District, Seoul, bustled with children starting summer vacation and trying out jobs. Across the virtual city, which recreates real urban facilities at two-thirds scale for children, kids with curious faces were riding fire engines to the scene or trying out police and medical jobs.
Amid spaces filled with jobs close to daily life that can be understood intuitively, a facility stood out that put the unfamiliar-to-adults semiconductor equipment engineer front and center. Above the glass door of a building with a blue exterior wall and a large "TEL (Tokyo Electron)" logo, it read "semiconductor research lab" (Semiconductor Dream Lab). Through the plate glass, the white clean room clearly revealed facilities including console equipment and silver air-shower machines.
Tokyo Electron Korea will operate the "TEL Semiconductor Dream Lab" set up at KidZania Seoul starting on the 28th. KidZania is a theme park where real corporations and institutions create child-sized job spaces and participants take on roles to perform tasks. It currently operates KidZania experience centers in 32 cities across 23 countries. Among them, Seoul is the first to create a space for directly experiencing semiconductor manufacturing processes.
◇ A semiconductor research lab built in the heart of a children's city where fire engines come and go
The approximately 14-pyeong experience center is divided into three zones: orientation, dream lab, and dream city. Devices were placed throughout to convey, at a child's level, everything from entering a real semiconductor lab to performing processes and using the finished semiconductor.
Upon entering the interior space, there were, in order, ▲ sand as the raw material for semiconductors ▲ silicon ▲ a cylindrical ingot ▲ a featureless bare wafer ▲ a patterned wafer engraved with circuits ▲ and semiconductor chips. The experience begins at a spot that shows at a glance how a material starting from sand goes through multiple manufacturing processes to become a semiconductor used in smartphones, cars, and robots.
The experience proceeded in teams of six. Participants wore white and sky-blue cleanroom suits with anti-static grids and safety glasses. While the suits used fabric applied in real clean rooms, some structures such as around the ankles were modified so children could put them on and move easily. Wearing masks, gloves, and dedicated shoes as in real clean rooms was omitted.
"Semiconductors are so sensitive that they can fail from even tiny dust. We wear clean suits so dust or static from our bodies doesn't touch them." After hearing the explanation from a KidZania facilitator, they entered an industrial air shower. From equipment lowered to a child's height, air adjusted to about 70%–80% of that of real equipment blew from all directions for about seven seconds. As the vents on the silver walls and ceiling operated, the cleanroom suit clung to the body. After passing through the air shower, the main lab appeared, with six consoles arranged in a circle around a green-glowing "infinity cube."
◇ Applying photoresist, etching, cleaning, deposition… when the finished chips were inserted, the robot danced
Here, children are tasked with upgrading "Chips," a service robot who works at a restaurant but dreams of being a world-class dancer, with a high-performance semiconductor. Rather than a guided tour, the structure lets children naturally experience semiconductor processes within a story where they become "dream engineers" who help realize Chips' dream.
The semiconductor manufacturing process is generally divided into eight major steps: wafer manufacturing, oxidation, photo, etching, deposition/ion implantation, metallization, electrical characteristic testing, and packaging. TEL supplies photo coater/developer (photoresist coating/developing), etching, cleaning, and deposition equipment among the front-end processes. The experience center is also organized so children can perform these four front-end areas, for which the company supplies equipment, in a game format.
In the first photo-process coater/developer mission, they moved a dedicated brush to evenly apply a light-sensitive photoresist on the wafer on the screen. After extreme ultraviolet (EUV) exposure on the screen and developing the wafer, the once-blurry "TEL" letters appeared clearly. TEL does not supply exposure tools that irradiate EUV onto wafers, but supplies coater/developer equipment that applies photoresist before exposure and reveals circuit patterns after exposure.
In the second high-aspect-ratio (HARC) etching mission, they aligned the direction of plasma with a joystick and pressed a button to remove unnecessary parts other than the circuits. Aiming at the sparkling points on the screen and pressing the button made those areas disappear in sequence.
In the cleaning mission, they aimed a water gun with the same joystick to wash away contaminants marked in black on the wafer. The final atomic layer deposition (ALD) mission was similar to Tetris. Stacking alphabet-shaped blocks falling from above into gaps to make three layers completed a thin, uniform film. Through the motions of "applying, etching, cleaning, and stacking," the roles and necessity of the equipment performing each process were conveyed without difficulty.
After completing the four missions, the central infinity cube rose, and chip models labeled "TEL" and "D·R·E·A·M" emerged from under the consoles. When the six children simultaneously inserted the chips they had each completed into a long table, the movements of the "Chips" character on the large screen became smoother. The robot began to dance to the music, and a high-tech future city powered by semiconductors unfolded in the background.
One session takes about 20–25 minutes. Nineteen teams per day, with up to 114 people, can use it. The main target is third- to fifth-graders in elementary school. The games are intuitive enough to perform by moving the brush and joystick according to the instructions.
TEL is a Japanese semiconductor manufacturing equipment corporation founded in 1963. According to the company, its global market share in coater/developer equipment is over 90%, and its market share in EUV coater/developer equipment is 100%. Tokyo Electron Korea, the Korea subsidiary, was established in 1993.
Choi Nari, leader of the brand communications team at Tokyo Electron Korea, said, "Semiconductors are the foundation of industry, but they are too difficult for children," and added, "Rather than learning difficult content in a difficult way, we wanted them to experience it through play and feel that semiconductors are fun and that researchers do meaningful work." She continued, "We designed the space with the hope that children will take the job of semiconductor engineer as one of their many options for the future."