As computers get smaller and smaller, contamination becomes a bigger issue in manufacturing them. Even the vacuum chambers used in "clean rooms" aren't completely free of wayward particles-and even tiny particles can ruin an expensive set of silicon wafers.
Existing defenses against these trespassers aren't particularly sharp. They work by periodically checking the surfaces of silicon wafers for impurities. These methods are hit-and-miss, and they're helpless against particles smaller than two-tenths of a micrometer.
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Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
This document is part of the “How-To Guide for Most Common Measurements” centralized resource portal. This tutorial provides a detailed guide for measurement and device considerations to take temperature measurements using thermocouples. Get an introduction to thermocouples, which are inexpensive sensing devices widely used with PC-based data acquisition systems. Also review some specific thermocouple examples and learn how thermocouples work and ways to integrate them into a data acquisition measurement system.
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