Huge endeavor for tiny microchip
Some feature more than 50 billion tiny transistors that are 10,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair. They are made on gigantic, ultraclean factory floors that can be seven stories tall and run the length of four football fields.
Microchips are in many ways the lifeblood of the modern economy. They power computers, smartphones, cars, appliances and scores of other electronics. But the world’s demand for them has surged since the pandemic, which also caused supply-chain disruptions, resulting in a global shortage.
That, in turn, is fueling inflation and raising alarms that the United States is becoming too dependent on chips made abroad. The United States accounts for only about 12% of global semiconductor manufacturing capacity; more than 90% of the most advanced chips come from Taiwan.
Intel, a Silicon Valley titan that is seeking to restore its longtime lead in chip manufacturing technology, is making a $20 billion bet that it can help ease the chip shortfall. It is building two factories at its chip-making complex in Chandler, Ariz., and recently announced plans for a potentially bigger expansion, with new sites in New Albany, Ohio, and Magdeburg, Germany.
Why does making millions of these tiny components mean building — and spending — so big?
What chips do
Chips, or integrated circuits, began to replace bulky individual transistors in the late 1950s. Many of those tiny components are produced on a piece of silicon and connected to work together. The resulting chips store data, amplify radio signals and perform other operations; Intel is famous for a variety called microprocessors, which perform most of the calculating functions of a computer.
Intel has managed to shrink transistors on its microprocessors to mind-bending sizes. But the rival Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. can make even tinier components, a key reason Apple chose it to make the chips for its latest iphones.
Such wins by a company based in Taiwan, an island that China claims as its own, add to signs of a growing technology gap that could put advances in computing, consumer devices and military hardware at risk from China’s ambitions.
How chips are made
Chipmakers are packing more and more transistors onto each piece of silicon, which is why technology does more each year. It’s also the reason that new chip factories cost billions and fewer companies can afford to build them.
In addition to paying for buildings and machinery, companies must spend heavily to develop the complex processing steps used to fabricate chips from plate-size silicon wafers — which is why the factories are called “fabs.”
Enormous machines project designs for chips across each wafer and deposit and etch away layers of materials to create their transistors and connect them. Up to 25 wafers at a time move among those systems in special pods on automated overhead tracks.
Processing a wafer takes thousands of steps and up to two months. TSMC has set the pace for output in recent years, operating “gigafabs,” sites with four or more production lines. Dan Hutcheson, vice chair of marketresearch firm Techinsights, estimated that each site can process more than 100,000 wafers a month.
He estimated the capacity of Intel’s two planned $10 billion facilities in Arizona at about 40,000 wafers a month each.
How chips are packaged
After processing, the wafer is sliced into individual chips. These are tested and wrapped in
plastic packages to connect them to circuit boards or parts of a system.
That step has become a new battleground, because it is more difficult to make transistors even smaller. Where packaging a handful of chips together is now routine, Intel has developed one advanced product that uses new technology to bundle a remarkable 47 individual chips.
Why chip factories are different
Intel chips typically sell for hundreds to thousands of dollars each. Intel in March released its fastest microprocessor for desktop computers, for example, at a starting price of $739. A piece of dust invisible to the human eye can ruin one. So fabs have to be cleaner than a hospital operating room and need complex systems to filter air and regulate temperature and humidity.
Fabs must also be impervious to just about any vibration, which can cause costly equipment to malfunction.
Also critical is the ability to move vast amounts of liquids and gases. The top level of Intel’s factories, which are about 70 feet tall, have giant fans to help circulate air to the clean room directly below. Below the clean room are thousands of pumps, transformers, power cabinets, utility pipes and chillers that connect to production machines.
The need for water
Fabs are water-intensive operations. That’s because water is needed to clean wafers at many stages of production.
Intel’s two sites in Chandler collectively draw about 11 million gallons of water a day from the local utility. Intel’s future expansion will require considerably more, a seeming challenge for a drought-plagued state such as Arizona. Intel says its Chandler sites, which rely on supplies from three rivers and a system of wells, reclaim about 82% of the freshwater they use.
How fabs are built
To build its future factories, Intel will need about 5,000 skilled construction workers for three years.
They have a lot to do. Excavating the foundations is expected to remove 890,000 cubic yards of dirt, carted away at a rate of one dump truck per minute, said Dan Doron, Intel’s construction chief.
The company expects to pour more than 445,000 cubic yards of concrete and use 100,000 tons of reinforcement steel for the foundations — more than in constructing the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
Some cranes for the construction are so large that more than 100 trucks are needed to bring the pieces to assemble them, Doron said. The cranes will lift, among other things, 55-ton chillers for the new fabs.