And now, the explanation of that picture.
When Sun acquired StorageTek, it added a number of technologies, competencies, and lines of business to its portfolio, and many of these were completely new to Sun. A simple example: Sun is now a developer and vendor of mainframe peripherals and software. We have developers in Louisville, Woking, and Canberra, working on a code base of hundreds of thousands of lines of IBM Assembler and C. (Don’t knock it: this is a really good business to be in.)
In order to give Sun’s leading technologists a more detailed view of the full range of technologies that StorageTek brings to the table, we organized a meeting of TAC in Louisville last Friday. (TAC is a body chaired by Greg Papadopoulos, Sun’s Chief Technology Officer, and includes the CTOs from the various lines of business – software, servers, service, etc. – as well as the Sun Fellows. “High powered” doesn’t even begin to describe it!) In addition to presentations and discussions on various hardware and software programs, we took the TAC members to see another capability that StorageTek brings to Sun: microelectronic manufacturing.
StorageTek (now Sun) has always been one of the cutting-edge developers of tape storage systems, and at the densities and speeds we’re talking about you can no longer rely on commodity components. There are no standards (for servo patterns, encoding schemes, and so forth); you have to do it yourself. Even the tape media is specially formulated for each system. As a result, we design and manufacture thin-film read/write heads in our own facility. It’s not quite the same as semiconductor manufacturing – we’re dealing with exotic cocktails of metals designed to tune the magnetic properties of various components – but there are many similarities. In particular, the plant is divided into three zones, including “clean room” and “nearly clean”. (My colleagues can correct my terminology!)
Because of our tight schedule, we decided not to tour the clean room itself, although it would have been delightful to see some of my colleagues in full “bunny suits”. Instead we toured the “nearly clean” area, which only requires hair nets, beard nets, booties, smocks, and safety glasses. We split up into three groups for the tour. Here’s my group, just about ready to go:
And here’s another group, including Greg Papadopoulos. (Picture by Jim Hughes):
You can see all the pictures here in my gallery. Although I only took pictures while we were suited up, it’s worth mentioning that some of the most fascinating material came later, when we saw just how you go about debugging the design of such a component. (Hint: it’s relatively easy to contain electric current – insulators work pretty well – but it’s remarkably difficult to make a magnetic field do what you want it to.)
Many thanks to Richard Dee and the staff of the thin film facility for their time and knowledge.