It’s a Sterile Life for Clean-Room Workers : Technology: In factories where a speck of dust can wreck an experiment, a unique culture has grown.

PORTLAND, Ore. — Under the eerie yellow light of a clean-room laboratory, Mani Rahnama finishes a computer experiment and leaves for a break. A man dressed like Rahnama in a white bodysuit, hood and rubber gloves follows.

They proceed in silence through white, pristine corridors lined with stainless steel shelves. In the garment room, as workers remove their uniforms, the two men face each other and pull off their hoods.

“Hi,” the man says to Rahnama, “I just wanted to see what you looked like so we can recognize each other out of uniform.”

Rahnama smiles. He’s happy to see the man’s entire face. Usually, he can see only his colleague’s eyes.

Curious exchanges like that one are common among the thousands of people who work in the clean rooms of Oregon’s high-technology factories. In the sterile environments, companies create their products free from harmful microscopic bits common to normal factories. Such strict standards of cleanliness have spawned a unique culture at companies, including Intel Corp. and Wacker Siltronics Corp.

The dull din of purifying air passing through the rooms at 60 m.p.h. encourages the use of body language and intuition. Workers in “bunny suits” learn to identify one another by individual mannerisms and eye color. Women who cannot wear makeup, a major contaminant, sometimes pay hundreds of dollars for cosmetic tattooing on their eyebrows and lids.

“One of the major issues clean rooms have challenged us with is the cultural change,” said Anne Marie Dixon of Cleanroom Management Associates Inc., based in Carson City, Nev. Dixon travels the globe to promote clean-room safety and efficiency.

*

Few production-oriented jobs are as demanding or as fulfilling as those of clean-room technicians and engineers who, as Dixon likes to say, “create the future.” It’s estimated that clean-room workers make anywhere from $25,000 to $90,000 if they’re engineers.

On the demanding side: They must adhere to a strict workplace code. They dress in a full Gore-Tex suit or gown, complete with a hood or helmet and an attached breathing apparatus the likes of which might appear in a space movie. What’s more, they can’t sneeze, whistle, chew gum, wear scent, touch their face or bring personal items into the plant, for fear of contaminating the product. A mere fleck of dandruff, mascara or spit could cause thousands of dollars in damage.

One person sheds about 100 million particles per minute, so contamination prevention begins before workers enter the clean room.

At Intel, new employees pair up with mentors and take a four-day training course. They learn basics, such as allowing sufficient time for restroom breaks (employees must leave the clean room and “degown”) and nifty tricks such as sneezing in one’s mask with little spray.

Sam McDonald, who conducts the four-week training sessions at Wacker Siltronic, often feels as if he teaches mythology or psychology when he explains the world of micron particles to new employees.

“It’s just hard for people to visualize,” McDonald said with a sigh. “I have to say, ‘Just believe me,’ or pull out a handy gizmo called the laser particle counter, which makes them all believers.”

*

Attention to detail is crucial. Before entering Intel’s Fab 5 plant, where the company makes Pentium and 486 chips, employees cover their hair with cloth caps. They pass their shoes through a shoe-brush machine and slip mini-booties over them. Finally, they step on a sticky mat that traps dirt the way flypaper catches flies.

In a chamber attached to the clean room they put on thousand-dollar bunny suits, which are cleaned in special rooms on a regular basis. Before they enter the room itself, they turn in circles through an air shower that sprays off excess particles. “When you come in, you feel like you’ve walked into the set of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey,”’ said Yvonne Koslowsky, a technician at Intel’s Fab 5 plant. “But you get used to it after a while.”

Microcontamination managers who monitor the work environment (and everything that goes in it) select special “clean” equipment: chairs, pens, paper and tissues that collect as few particles as possible. Their fastidiousness earns them nicknames such as “Dr. Dust” and “Mr. Clean,” even after hours.

“Sometimes you’re stretching it in the work environment, but when you do it at home you get your fingers smacked,” confessed David Hope, a microcontamination manager at Intel.

*

Sterility prevails on a cultural level as well. Unable to personalize their work environment, clean-room employees miss out on everyday office rituals the rest of us take for granted, something as simple as hanging holiday decorations or family photos.

“Suppose you worked in an environment where you had no windows, no radio contact and everyone came by you only when necessary because conversations create more particles,” said Bill Soules, a clean-room workplace consultant in Rochester, N.Y. “It creates feelings of isolation, a loss of personal identity.”

And stress. Mistakes happen, when machines or humans err, or silicon discs that contain dozens of hundred-dollar, uncut chips break. Chips go bad. The manufacturing process, nonstop at Intel, slows down.

Beepers wake engineers at home during the middle of the night. Coded alarms hit clean-room intercoms. Frantic workers rush to remedy the situation, whatever it may be.

During those hectic moments, says one technician, it can get so hot in a bunny suit that workers have to wring the sweat from their undergarments during breaks.

“People think we’re abnormal,” said Rahnama, a 29-year-old engineer who has worked at Intel’s research and development plant for one year.

But even while they are teased for their plain dress and their “fab hair” (similar to “hat hair”), people who hold these jobs have reasons to endure the discomforts.

Laporta Engelbrecht has only to recall the myriad problems she solves on a daily basis as an Intel engineering manager.

“Coming up with the solutions is exciting,” she said. “It’s like you’re a detective in a mystery. That’s what makes all the hard work worthwhile.”