Intel’s Fab 42: A Peek Inside One of the World’s Most Advanced Factories
One of the largest construction projects in the U.S. with almost 6,000 workers is underway on Intel’s Ocotillo campus in Arizona. Intel is outfitting Fab 42 with 1,300 tools (many of them requiring multiple trucks to move), a super overhead highway that zips silicon wafers around all four of the company’s Arizona factories, and a 12-acre water plant that will treat 9.1 million gallons of wastewater a day.
Intel’s Masking Operation
Intel Mask Operation: An Inside Look at a Critical Manufacturing Step
Around the corner from Intel’s Santa Clara, California, headquarters is an unassuming building that houses a critically important step in the process of manufacturing chips: the Intel Mask Operation.
What’s a mask? It’s a six-by-six-inch piece of quartz, a quarter-inch thick, that is used as the template to print circuitry onto a silicon wafer. To create a mask, engineers use computerized drawings from chip designers that are the blueprints for Intel processors and their billions of transistors.
Without the Intel Mask Operation, the company’s factories in Oregon, Arizona, Ireland and Israel would be unable to create a single processor. It takes 70 flawless masks to print the many layers of a single Intel 14nm die.
The Intel Mask Operation in Santa Clara, California, builds the masks used as the templates to print circuitry onto a silicon wafer. To create a mask, engineers use computerized drawings that are the blueprints for Intel processors and their billions of transistors. (Credit: Tim Herman/Intel Corporation)
An Intel engineer inspects a mask as part of the Intel Mask Operation in Santa Clara, California. The mask operation team builds the masks used as the templates to print circuitry onto a silicon wafer. To create a mask, engineers use computerized drawings that are the blueprints for Intel processors and their billions of transistors. (Credit: Tim Herman/Intel Corporation)
