Intel Oregon Fab Expansion Milestone: First Chipmaking Tool Rolls in

[btarunr]

For most people, a tool is something you hold in your hand: pliers, hammer, screwdriver. Inside an Intel chip factory, a tool is a whole different deal. Fab tools are huge and hugely costly and take entire teams to muscle into place and install. As Intel aggressively ramps its worldwide manufacturing footprint, a construction milestone recently passed at Intel's Ronler Acres factory in Hillsboro, Oregon.

At the company's massive $3 billion Mod3 factory expansion, the first tool rolled in. The honor went to a thin film deposition tool. It arrived not in a leather tool belt, but aboard two semitractor-trailers. Once completed and hooked up, it will weigh 10 tons. And by the time the Mod3 project is done in about six months, the thin film deposition tool will be joined by more than a dozen like it. A typical Intel fab, once built out, is stuffed with about 1,200 chipmaking tools, many of them costing millions of dollars apiece.



To satisfy the mushrooming global demand for computer chips, Intel is building or expanding factories in Arizona, New Mexico, Ireland, Israel and Costa Rica. And CEO Pat Gelsinger has told the tech world to stay tuned for news of more Intel fabs around the world.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[BryanNitro]

Expensive yes.. but now we can make chips in complete confidence, without risk of sabotage or theft of design.

 

[ZoneDymo]

"At the company's massive $3 billion Mod3 factory expansion"

kinda hard to think of 3 billion dollars as "massive" when the casually throw out the estimate for a new fab somewhere between 60 and 120 billion.....as if that is not a gigantic difference in amount

 

[Matthew Linke]

Interesting news.

 

[BryanNitro]

well i might have AMD but i grew up intel/amd/nvidia first pc amd copy production intel 8088 still have my X48 Q9450 Crysis DEATH machine 2x 8800GTX SLI still works but man 1/10th in comparison to what i have now.

 

[Vayra86]

Expensive yes.. but now we can make chips in complete confidence, without risk of sabotage or theft of design.

Yeah because there are no domestic spies in the world, that's so 1990.

 

[BryanNitro]

Yeah because there are no domestic spies in the world, that's so 1990.

If you only knew the truth bud you probably wouldn't want to use computers anymore, the attacks intel does to AMD nvidia attacking AMD and ARM so much cross traffic lack of advancement and basically they are all using the same schematics anyway. nvidia diamond back layout amd checkerboard.