Everyone talks about the chip shortage but not about how nuts the actual process of making computer chips is. Nanometer scales. Cleanrooms that can only have a thousand dust particles per cubic meter and have airlocks (pharmaceutical and space stuff can get even cleaner though). And a ton of CRAZY specialty chemicals and gases that will ignite in air and/or otherwise murder you, which I work on handling equipment for. Basically cabinets that hold the gas cylinders and safely monitor and regulate flow to the actual tools and machines used in chip manufacturing.

The most cartoonishly evil one might be chlorine trifluoride. It will react with and burn basically anything besides some treated metals, including glass, asbestos, concrete, and even metals like gold that basically never react. And water it reacts especially aggressively in, particular the water in living flesh. So it’ll poison and burn you and everything around you all while emitting hydrofluoric and hydrochloric acid steam. During an industrial leak in the 50s, a ton of it burned through a foot of concrete and three feet of gravel.

Oh, and it was originally developed by the Nazis and planned to be used as a both an incendiary and chemical weapon simultaneously and then considered as a rocket fuel in the 50s but was rejected for both due to how hard it was to handle or control.

In the 90s it found use as a cleaner in chemical vapor deposition chambers used in the semiconductor industry because it could be used without dismantling the chambers or needing heat beyond what they could make.

Am I using this in some kind of story? I will somehow. I just want to sit back and learn more first because I like to keep my more realistic/horror stories grounded in technicality.