I’ve worked with electron microscopes and in silicon fabs and it’s super fun being on the teams hunting for sources of noise during construction and bringup. In

I’ve worked with electron microscopes and in silicon fabs and it’s super fun being on the teams hunting for sources of noise during construction and bringup. In fabs there are multiple teams because it’s so specialized, the HVAC team being the most interesting one because they’ve got tons of mechanical and electronic sources all over the buildings. They were also the long tail for problems with yield (which was expected and budgeted for). I think the EM startup I worked for failed in part due to not taking the issue seriously enough. I can’t tell any specific stories but poorly shielded USB ports were the bane of our existence in the 2000s. Every motherboard would come with them and the second a random floor worker would plug something in it’d take down a section of the fab or all of the microscopes even if it were on the other side of the building. For some god forsaken reason all the SBC manufacturers used by tons of the bespoke equipment were also adding USB ports everywhere. We ended up glueing all of them shut over the course of the several months it took to discover each machine as floor workers circumvented the ban on USB devices (they had deadlines to meet so short of gluing them shut we couldn’t really enforce the ban).