Collected Essays

by Rucker, Rudy

  What next? Enderton says, “The holy grail is to do a believable human in clothes—a human with cloth and hair. This is hard because you know exactly how a human moves, reflects light, and behaves. You’re never seen a live dinosaur, which was an advantage for Jurassic.”

  The success of digital compositing and of the computer animations for Jurassic Park has set off a small upheaval within ILM. The tinkerers in the creature shop and the model shop feel threatened. “I liked working on a stage with lights, making something to look real,” recalls Jeff Mann, former head of the model shop, and now Director of Production Operations, which creates digital mattes. “There’s a camaraderie in the production aspect; you have a common goal to make it real. We worked for ten years to make the process flow smoothly, and it seems weird to suddenly do it all on one work station. The change to work stations is happening so fast—it’s like the Richter scale. It’s stressful for a fair number of the model builders. ILM is trying to retrain the optical compositors as digital compositors, and to teach some the model builders to use the tools of the computer to build computer models. Some will be able to adapt, some will get to keep building models, and some will go do something else.”

  But models are not going to fade out overnight. Even in Jurassic Park, the old-style rubber models were used for many scenes—such as the one where the T. Rex attacks the car. For each shot, it’s a question of which technique will get the job done for the least money in the fastest time. Despite ILM’s recent alliance with the Silicon Graphics computer company to form a Joint Environment for Digital Imaging (JEDI!), convincingly realistic computer animations are still very expensive. As Dippé puts it, “A movie like T2 or Jurassic is like building the pyramids.”

  The model builders refer to their creations as “gags.” They’re like elaborate practical jokes, in a way, things that can fool your naked eye. They’re fun to be around.

  An example. As I was touring the creature shop with Mark Dippé and the ILM publicist Miles Perkins, Mark suddenly said, “Hey, Rudy, look at this!”

  I walked over and Mark pulled back a sheet that had covered a tortured rubber man on an operating table. Leaning over him was a rubber alien wielding something that looked like dental apparatus. Suddenly the tortured man began to move and twitch. I screamed. The gag was a hidden cable leading to a control in Miles’s hands. This was fun. I thought about Jeff Mann’s wondering if working on a work station could ever be as much fun.

  While I was in the creature shop, Miles mentioned to me that the main stash of old models and creatures is in the ILM archives, located at Skywalker Ranch, a half hour deeper into Marin County. I had an instant mental image of the great hall where the crated-up Ark of the Covenant gets stored at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I knew I had to go.

  Several days later, I drive with ILM head publicist Lisa van Cleef up a misty winding valley towards the California coast. The Skywalker Ranch includes George Lucas’s offices, a sound studio, and guest quarters for visiting ILM customers—such as Steven Spielberg. Everything is California perfect, like the best weekend retreat you can imagine. The sound studio has a small vineyard in its front yard, a gift to George from Francis Ford Coppola. There’s even a small fire department and a small working ranch with a few dozen cows—- both these features having been mandated by Marin County before they’d approve the construction of Skywalker Ranch. Since the cows aren’t really there for ranching, they’re prop cows, which seems appropriate.

  There are three or four men busy working on models in the archive building, and one of them, Don Bies, acts as my guide. “You’ve come at a really good time,” he tells me. “We’re just restoring the Star Wars models to send them on tour to some museums in Japan.” Here in the archives the model builders are happy, and the work stations are far away.

  The first gag that catches my eye is a baggy humanoid shape, orange with green spots, rubbery, with a hula skirt bedizened with electronic parts, and with a face sporting a three foot snout with red-lipsticked lips on the end. “That’s Sy Snootles, the singer from the band that plays in Jabba the Hut’s castle in The Return of the Jedi,” Don tells me. I pick up a handgrip connected to a cable that leads into the figure’s back. When I squeeze the grip, Sy’s lips purse.

  Right next to Sy Snootles is Darth Vader’s costume. The cryptic alien writing on the little control panels on his chest is Hebrew. “Not many people realize that Darth Vader is Jewish,” smiles Don. “Notice also that he’s clean. Darth Vader and the robot C3PO are the only shiny things in the Star Wars universe. Everything else there is grungy.”

  We turn next to a yard-long spaceship model. “We wanted to make this the shape of an outboard motor that’s been rocked up out of the water,” says Don. “For the details we used a technique we call kit-bashing. We include a lot of pieces from standard model kits. See that there, it’s the conning tower of a submarine, and here’s the hull of a destroyer ship, and this down here is the front of a jet plane, and up here is part of a helicopter.” This kit-bashed spaceship is a reality collage. The computer graphics animators scan textures from reality, but the model makers just break up and reassemble reality.

  “Where’s R2D2?” I ask. He’s always been my favorite.

  Don points, and I turn to see a whole herd of R2D2’s in a far corner. There are eleven of him. Why so many? Because when Star Wars was filmed, the science of radio-controlled machines was quite primitive, and it was easier to build a different R2D2 to do each of the different things he was supposed to be able to do: turn his head, roll, fall to pieces, and so on. Each R2D2 has a big “holographic projector lens” near his top. The lenses look familiar because—they’re those movable nozzle lights that airplanes used to have over the passenger seats. “And those slots along his side are from coin-operated vending machines,” Don adds. It’s kit-bashing in a higher, more industrial way.

  Now we come to the gilded Ark of the Covenant itself, resting beside a busted-open wood crate. Stenciled on the crate is “Eigentum Des Deutsches Reich,” with a swastika. I really am in the Raiders of the Lost Ark warehouse, and now, yes, Don opens a cabinet and he pulls out the matte painting of the Raiders warehouse scene, a giant sheet of glass with piles and piles of boxes fading into the painterly distances, and with an irregular trapezoid of clear glass where the image of the moving warehouseman was projected for optical compositing.

  The ceiling struts in the matte painting seem to match the struts in the archive room, and when I go back outside and the foggy beauty of this hidden valley spreads out before me, it’s hard for me not to believe, for a moment, that I am looking at an even huger matte painting.

  And then the wind and the movement of the light remind me that this is real, this is where I live. In the mist a big bird circles on great, fingered wings, and I’m filled with joy at being alive in a world where I can dig into the details, just as I am, without a work station.

  Standing there bathed in the real world’s full-body sensory input, the efforts of computer reality seemed fiddling and paltry. The world has been running a massively parallel computation for billions of years, after all; how can we even dream of trying to make our machines catch up?

  But we do keep pursuing the impossible dream of computer reality anyway; we keep on trying to digitally kit-bash the cosmic matte. It’s one of the human race’s ways of blooming—like science or like art. And in a funny way, thinking about computer realities gives you a greater appreciation for the real thing you get to walk around in.

  * * *

  Note on “Use Your Illusion: Kit-Bashing the Cosmic Matte”

  Written in 1993.

  Published in Wired, Sept/Oct, 1993.

  In 1993, I managed to connect with the then rather new Wired magazine in San Francisco. They basically took over the market niche for high-tech weirdness that Mondo 2000 had carved out. The Wired mix replaced psychedelia with entrepreneurism, and they were a zillion times more profitable.

  I seem to recall that my initial
contact at Wired was the writer Kevin Kelly, who I’d met at the first conference on Artificial Life. Wired gave me three really great journalism gigs, and the first of these was to meet the wizards at ILM.

  Robot Obstetric Wards

  I fell in love with the Silicon Valley word “fab” the first time I heard it. This short, moderne word means “chip fabrication plant.” A manager might, for instance, say “What kind of outs are we getting from the fab?” In the ‘50s and ‘60s, of course, fab was short for “fabulous,” as in the detergent Fab, or as in the lines in “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” that go: “I ran right outside and I hopped inside a cab. I went out the other door; this Englishman said fab.” Gear! Kicky!

  After exceedingly many phone calls, I managed to get to go inside two fabs in Silicon Valley, one belonging to the chip-giant Intel, and the other to Intel’s small challenger, AMD (Advanced Micro Devices). AMD recently won a court battle with Intel over the right to produce its own “K6” version of the popular 486 processor chips for DOS and Windows-based personal computers. AMD is very much a “we try harder” company, and they were the first to let me into their fab—a quarter-billion-dollar building in Sunnyvale called the Submicron Development Center.

  A micron is a unit of measurement equal to one millionth of a meter. A typical human hair might be a hundred microns wide. The scale of chips is discussed in terms of the size of the smallest features of the patterns on the chip. Today’s chips use features about half a micron in size, hence they are said to be using submicron designs.

  AMD’s Submicron Development Center was originally intended to be purely a research facility, but the demand for the AMD 486 chips is such that the facility is now also being used for commercial production. It turns out to be crowded and a bit hellish in the AMD fab, which feels to be about the size of a wide office-building corridor plus maybe six offices on either side.

  Something I hadn’t initially realized is that being a fab worker is like being any other kind of assembly-line worker. It’s a rigorous blue-collar job. Most of the workers are Asian or Hispanic. The AMD fab is open twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year except Christmas—and in the Intel fab they work on Christmas too. The workers pull twelve-hour shifts, with three shifts one week and four shifts the next, for an average of forty-one hours a week. Although some of the fab workers are highly paid engineers, starting pay for a simple technician is around $24,000 a year, which comes to something like $12 an hour.

  What actually goes on in a fab? A fab buys blank silicon wafers and draws complicated patterns on them. This changes a wafer’s value from $200 to $30,000 or more. It’s almost like printing money. The catch is that each of the many machines used in a fab costs over a million dollars. And buying machines for your fab is kind of complicated, although the Sematech consortium is seeking to make this easier.

  When a fab finishes a wafer, the wafer is shipped to another plant where the wafer is sawed up into chips and the chips are put into the familiar plastic cases with wires coming out. These secondary plants are mostly in southeast Asia—the Silicon Valley fabs are solely concerned with printing the chips onto the wafers. To avoid dust, the wafers are shipped in vacuum-sealed bags.

  The essence of the environment inside a fab is that this is a place for chips and not for people. People are dirty. Their bodies flake and crumble, sending off showers of dust. One dust particle can ruin a chip, for instance by shorting out the separation between two nearby submicron circuit lines.

  In the current prehistoric state of robotics, there is no hope of fully automating a fab, especially given the fact that the process technology is subject to being changed over and over. To deal with having dirty people in there, the fab must be maintained as a clean room.

  The cleanliness of a room is specified in terms of the number of particles larger than one micron that can be found in a cubic foot of air. An average non-smoking restaurant might have a few hundred thousand of such particles per cubic foot. In a surgical operating theater, the level is brought down to about twenty thousand. In the outer hallways of a fab building, the level is ten thousand, while in the wafer-handling areas of the fab itself, the level is brought down to one individual particle per cubic foot. How? At AMD the procedure went like this.

  My guide is Dan Holiga, a member of the AMD Corporate Training division, responsible for instructing new workers on clean room procedures and for arranging science courses for them at local colleges. Dan leads me into the pregowning room. The floor inside the door is covered with sticky adhesive. I sit down on a bench and put some blue booties over my shoes so as not to track dirt into the locker room. The woman behind the counter can’t find Dan’s special fab badge, so she gives him a Visitor badge like mine. We select building suits in our sizes: two-piece suits like tight-cuffed blue pajamas. The woman gives us each some white plastic shoes like bowling shoes.

  In the pregowning room, we stash our street-clothes in the lockers and put on the blue building suits and the white plastic shoes. We wash our hands and put on hair nets and safety glasses. Dan has brought a camera with him. We walk through a corridor into the outer hallway of the fab building. This is the ten-thousand-particles-per-cubic-foot zone, and the air feels cleaner than any I’ve breathed in a long time. My allergies are gone; the odorless air flows smoothly into my lungs.

  We pass a break room where some of the fab workers are having non-dusty snacks like apple juice and yogurt. Then we go into a second locker room. I’d thought we were already dressed for the fab, but that was just the start. The second locker room is the gowning room proper.

  Rudy in the chip fab gowning room. (Photo by Dan Holiga.)

  Here we put on latex gloves. Then we wipe off our safety glasses and our Visitor badges and Dan’s camera—wipe everything three times with lint-free alcohol-soaked cloths. We put on white hoods and “bunny suit” overalls made of Fibrotek, which is a sandwich of nylon and Teflon. We pull “fab booties” over our shoes and we put on face masks. We pull vinyl gloves over our latex gloves. This is starting to feel a teensy bit…obsessive. I’m reminded of the “environmentally ill” people you see in Berkeley natural food stores, shopping while wearing gas-masks and elbow-length gloves. They’d love it here in the gowning room. But, I remind myself, this isn’t about obsession here, this is about objective scientific fact: getting down to one micron-sized particle of dirt per cubic foot of air!

  Now Dan leads me through the air shower: a corridor lined with air-nozzles blasting away. We hold up our hands and turn around, letting the air wash us all over. The invisible particles fall to the floor, where they are sucked away. In the air shower and in the fab, the floors are coarse grates, and the ceilings are filled with fans. There is a constant flow of air from above to below, with any showers of filthy human particles being sucked out through the floor grates. The air in a fab is completely changed ten times a minute.

  I step out of the air shower and, fully purified, I step into the fab. As the Bible says, “I was glad when they said unto me, let us go into the house of the Lord.” I am in the heart of the temple to the God-machine of Silicon Valley. The lights are yellow to avoid clouding the photo-resist emulsions; this gives the fab a strange, underworld feeling. The rushing air streams down past me from ceiling to floor. Other white-garbed figures move about down the corridor; all of us are dressed exactly the same.

  On the sides of the corridor are metal racks holding boxes or “boats” of wafers waiting for the next stage of their processing. The racks have wires instead of shelves—there are in fact no flat horizontal surfaces at all in a fab, as such surfaces collect dust and interfere with the air flow.

  The only hint of human contamination is the meaty smell of my breath, bounced back to me by the white fabric face mask I’m wearing. I wish I could tear off the mask and breathe the clean pure air of the chips. But then I would exhale, and the wafers wouldn’t like that—detectors would notice the increased number of particles-per-cubic-foot, and lights would flash.
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  The layout of a fab is a single main corridor with bays on either side. To keep the bays clean and uncluttered, most of their machines are set so that the faces of the machines are flush to the bay walls, with the bodies of the machines sticking out into sealed-off corridors called chases. Like people, machines have bodies whose exigencies are not fully tidy. The chases are clean only to a ten particles per cubic foot level, as opposed to the bays and the main fab corridor, which are kept at the one particle level.

  As we move down the main corridor to start our tour, people recognize Dan and come over to pat him on the back or on the arm. Dan theorizes that in the clean room, people can’t see each other’s faces, so they tend to fill in non-verbal communication by touching each other. Another factor could be that, given that everyone is clean, there is no fear of getting yourself dirty through human contact. Or maybe it’s just that you have less inhibitions towards someone who is dressed exactly like you. In any case, the fab workers seems to have a strong team spirit and sense of camaraderie. They’re like happy termites in a colony.

  The craft of getting a hundred 486 or Pentium chips onto a silicon wafer involves laying down about twenty layers of information. It’s a little like printing a silk-screen reproduction with twenty different colors of ink. At each step a fresh layer of silicon dioxide is baked on, parts of the new layer are etched away, and metals or trace elements are added to the exposed areas.