On the afternoon of the 27th, KidZania Seoul in Songpa-gu, Seoul, bustled with children starting hands-on job experiences for summer vacation. Across the virtual city, which reproduces real urban facilities at two-thirds scale for children, youngsters with curious faces were riding fire trucks to respond to calls or trying out police and medical jobs.
In a space with many jobs closely tied to daily life and easy to grasp intuitively, a facility stood out that put the unfamiliar-to-adults role of semiconductor equipment engineer front and center. Above the glass door of a building with a blue exterior and a large "TEL (Tokyo Electron)" logo, the sign read "Semiconductor research lab" (Semiconductor Dream Lab). Through the full-height glass, facilities inside the white clean room were clearly visible, including console equipment and silver air-shower devices.
Tokyo Electron Korea will begin operating the "TEL Semiconductor Dream Lab" set up at KidZania Seoul on the 28th. KidZania is a theme park where real corporations and institutions create child-oriented job spaces, and participants become professionals in those roles to carry out missions. It currently runs KidZania experience centers in 32 cities across 23 countries. Among them, Seoul is the first to create a space for hands-on experience of semiconductor manufacturing processes.
◇ Semiconductor research lab set up in the middle of a children's city where fire trucks come and go
The roughly 14-pyeong experience center is divided into three zones: "orientation," "dream lab," and "dream city." From the entry process for a real semiconductor lab to performing processes and using finished semiconductors, features tailored to children were placed throughout.
Upon entering the interior, the following were laid out in order: ▲sand, the raw material for semiconductors ▲silicon ▲a cylindrical ingot ▲a bare wafer with no pattern ▲a patterned wafer etched with circuits ▲and semiconductor chips. The experience begins at a station that shows at a glance how material that starts as sand becomes semiconductors that go into smartphones, cars, and robots through multiple manufacturing processes.
The activity proceeded with teams of six. Participants wore white and sky-blue cleanroom suits with anti-static grids and safety goggles. While the suits used fabric employed in real clean rooms, some structures such as the ankle area were modified so children could put them on easily and move comfortably. Wearing face masks, gloves, and dedicated shoes as in actual clean rooms was omitted.
"Semiconductors are so sensitive that even very small dust can cause malfunctions. We wear clean suits so dust or static from our bodies doesn't touch them." After hearing the explanation from a KidZania facilitator, the children entered an industrial air shower. From equipment lowered to children's height, air adjusted to 70%–80% of the strength of real devices blew from all directions for about seven seconds. As the vents on the silver walls and ceiling operated, the cleanroom suits clung to their bodies. After passing through the air shower, the main lab appeared, with six consoles arranged in a circle around a green-glowing "infinity cube."
◇ Coating photoresist, then etching, cleaning, and deposition… when the finished chips were inserted, the robot danced
Here, the children are given a mission to upgrade "Chips," a service robot who works at a restaurant but dreams of being a world-class dancer, with high-performance semiconductors. Rather than a guided tour, the structure lets children naturally experience semiconductor processes within a story in which they become "dream engineers" who help make Chips' dream come true.
The semiconductor manufacturing flow is typically divided into eight major processes: wafer fabrication, oxidation, lithography, etching, deposition/ion implantation, metallization, electrical testing, and packaging. Among these, TEL mainly supplies front-end equipment including coater/developer (photoresist coating/development) for lithography, etching, cleaning, and deposition tools. It also has oxidation, prober, and bonding equipment, but the experience center is designed so children perform game-like tasks for the four front-end areas that are the company's core business.
In the first lithography coater/developer mission, they used a dedicated brush to evenly apply a light-sensitive photoresist on a wafer on the screen. After extreme ultraviolet (EUV) exposure proceeded on the screen and the wafer was developed, the once-faint "TEL" letters emerged sharply. TEL does not provide exposure equipment that irradiates EUV onto wafers, but supplies coater/developer tools that apply photoresist before exposure and reveal circuit patterns after exposure.
In the second high-aspect-ratio contact (HARC) etching mission, they aligned the direction of plasma with a joystick and pressed a button to remove unnecessary parts outside the circuit. Aiming at the sparkling points on the screen and pressing the button made the targeted areas disappear one after another.
In the cleaning mission, they used the same joystick to aim a water gun and wash off contaminants marked in black on the wafer. The final atomic layer deposition (ALD) mission resembled Tetris. Stacking falling alphabet-shaped blocks to fill gaps into three layers created a thin, uniform film. Through the motions of "coating, etching, cleaning, and stacking," the roles and necessity of the equipment for each process were conveyed without difficulty.
After completing the four missions, the central infinity cube rose, and from beneath the consoles, chip models labeled "TEL" and "D·R·E·A·M" appeared. When all six participants simultaneously inserted their individual finished chips 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 futuristic city powered by semiconductors unfolded in the background.
One session takes about 20–25 minutes. Nineteen teams a day, up to 114 people, can participate. The main audience is third- to fifth-graders in elementary school. The games are intuitive enough to play 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 for coater/developer equipment is over 90%, and its market share for EUV coater/developer tools is 100%. The Korea unit, Tokyo Electron Korea, was established in 1993.
Choi Nari, leader of brand communications at Tokyo Electron Korea, said, "Semiconductors are the foundation of industry but are too difficult for children," and added, "Instead of learning hard content the hard way, we wanted them to experience through play that semiconductors are fun and that researchers do meaningful work." Choi went on to say, "We designed the space hoping that children would carry the job of semiconductor engineer as one option among their many dreams."