Interesting Intel Articles

... Inside this chip fabrication plant on the outskirts of Phoenix, engineers clad in what look like space suits are six months into a dramatic overhaul that could determine Intel's future as it faces its stiffest competition in more than a decade.

Intel closed the factory, officially known as Fab 12, for 18 months and spent $2 billion to retool it with more than 800 machines that follow a new manufacturing recipe cooked up more than four years ago and is already in place at a plant in Oregon. By year's end, the process will be up and running in a total of four fabs.

"Nobody ramps a technology at the rate we do," says Intel Vice President Tom Franz. "I'd be willing to stand up and say that in front of anybody, including our competitors."

The overhaul is part of Intel's and the rest of the semiconductor industry's relentless quest to shrink the size of its circuitry so more transistors fit onto the same size chips. For decades, the industry has doubled the number of transistors on a chip every two years or so, a pace that has become known as Moore's Law, after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore predicted it in a 1965 article ....

... CHANDLER, Ariz. (AP) - Intel Corp. (INTC), the world's biggest chip maker, is unique in the way it rolls out new manufacturing methods, perfecting it in a laboratory and then painstakingly duplicating it at factories around the world.

The strategy, first employed in the mid-1980s, is called "Copy Exactly." And the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company means it.

Engineers strive to duplicate even the subtlest of manufacturing variables, from the color of a worker's gloves to the type of fluorescent lights in the building. Employees from around the world spend more than a year at a development lab in Oregon learning their small piece of the new recipe so they can bring it back to their home factory.

The idea, says Dave Aires, plant manager for Intel's Fab 12 factory in Chandler, Ariz., is to capture the infinite number of intangibles that have allowed a process to succeed in plants that have already brought it online ....

I found these two articles interesting, although, surely "managed" well by the Intel PR team. Nevertheless, I think many here will find them interesting as well (some won't). If most feel they are "off topic" (not CPU specific), I can move or delete them.

... Inside this chip fabrication plant on the outskirts of Phoenix, engineers clad in what look like space suits are six months into a dramatic overhaul that could determine Intel's future as it faces its stiffest competition in more than a decade.

Intel closed the factory, officially known as Fab 12, for 18 months and spent $2 billion to retool it with more than 800 machines that follow a new manufacturing recipe cooked up more than four years ago and is already in place at a plant in Oregon. By year's end, the process will be up and running in a total of four fabs.

"Nobody ramps a technology at the rate we do," says Intel Vice President Tom Franz. "I'd be willing to stand up and say that in front of anybody, including our competitors."

The overhaul is part of Intel's and the rest of the semiconductor industry's relentless quest to shrink the size of its circuitry so more transistors fit onto the same size chips. For decades, the industry has doubled the number of transistors on a chip every two years or so, a pace that has become known as Moore's Law, after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore predicted it in a 1965 article ....

... CHANDLER, Ariz. (AP) - Intel Corp. (INTC), the world's biggest chip maker, is unique in the way it rolls out new manufacturing methods, perfecting it in a laboratory and then painstakingly duplicating it at factories around the world.

The strategy, first employed in the mid-1980s, is called "Copy Exactly." And the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company means it.

Engineers strive to duplicate even the subtlest of manufacturing variables, from the color of a worker's gloves to the type of fluorescent lights in the building. Employees from around the world spend more than a year at a development lab in Oregon learning their small piece of the new recipe so they can bring it back to their home factory.

The idea, says Dave Aires, plant manager for Intel's Fab 12 factory in Chandler, Ariz., is to capture the infinite number of intangibles that have allowed a process to succeed in plants that have already brought it online ....

«Many other parameters are also factored in, namely, existing local infrastructures of all sorts, the fluvial or sea proximity and such.»

It rains alot in Oregon. Fab manufacturing requires a lot of water to process wafers. Cheap electricity because of Bonniville dam in the Dalles. PGE also provide the best service to Intel if there is a power interrupt.
Implanter uses Tera Watts of electricity which make PGE happy.

Hell ya. Oregon rocks.