Okay so I’ll admit that no one seems to have heard of the company where I am working. That is because we mainly make equipment that we then sell to companies that you have heard of. Just about every semiconductor chip has probably been looked at by one of our tools at some point in its lifetime. Last year the company made $2b, and apparently there is about a 30% increase for this next year… not trivial stuff. The most expensive tools end up costing about $30 million.
Anyways it is kind of difficult to tell people what we actually make. We basically make tools that look at silicon wafers and then determines if everything has been made okay so far, but even though this description is accurate, it does not do the work justice. The defects that we need to measure on the wafers are small… really small. Currently the tools are equivalent to standing in outer space, 100 miles from the ground, and taking 10 seconds to find a defect the size of a quarter on a street anywhere in the area of San Francisco (roughly a 5 mile by 5 mile square). Now THAT sounds a bit more impressive!
As a side note, obviously we need to constantly improve.. so they said it would be equivalent to next wanting to find out the year of the quarter, and to observe the edges of the quarter. This industry is nuts
