At risk of the blog becoming stale already, I thought I’d fall back on some older material of mine. Back in the summer of 2007 I worked in a semiconductor research fab lab. Everything was pretty much focused on the engineering, and yet there were unintentionally beautiful things to be found here and there. Like the brilliant colors on wafers caused by thin-film interference in the silicon dioxide we grew and later etched, or the patterns created by rows of copper and stainless steel gas tubing that snaked outside of the cleanroom, delivering vital gasses to the equipment therein. I brought a camera in one day to capture some of this unintentional beauty.

This photo captures the perfectly flat, mirror-like surface of a set of freshly cleaned wafers in a quartz boat, waiting to be loaded into an oxidation furnace. The no-lint wipe that the boat is sitting on becomes very interesting with the depth of field. The red dot on the wafers is from a power-on lamp on a sputtering machine behind the camera.