Senselet: Distributed Sensing Infrastructure for Improving Process Control and Safety in Academic Cleanroom Environments

Semiconductor cleanrooms are used to fabricate devices with feature sizes that can be much smaller than a dust particle. Hence, any environmental deviations in temperature, or humidity around fabrication instruments may become the root cause of hundreds of transistors failing during the manufacturing. Furthermore, researchers work with dangerous chemicals in cleanrooms and violation of safety may lead to disastrous consequences. Therefore, we have developed an affordable, locally-controlled distributed sensing infrastructure, called SENSELET, for academic cleanrooms. It provides highly effective services for environment sensing around scientific instruments, sensory data collection and visualization, indoor localization, and instrument proximity detection for safety of researchers.