San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
S.A. chipmaker weighs expansion
Facility in overdrive as global shortage propels demand
With manufacturers clamoring for computer chips amid a global shortage, Israel-based Tower Semiconductor’s sprawling plant on San Antonio’s far West Side is working overtime.
Known as a fabrication facility, or “fab,” it annually turns out about 500 million microelectronic circuits that make vehicles, laptops, cellphones and digital devices work. It produces chips for customers in the aerospace, automotive, mobile communications and health care industries.
Tower, which operates eight fabs around the world, bought the San Antonio facility from California-based Maxim Integrated in 2016 in a stock transaction valued at $40 million.
Manufacturers are scouring the globe for chips, and Tower is one of the beneficiaries. In November, the company reported third-quarter revenue of $386.7 million for all of its operations, up 25 percent from $310 million the year before.
Tower executives say they’re deciding whether to expand the San Antonio fab, which employs 660 workers, or build a new facility elsewhere.
About 440 of its local employees pull 12-hour shifts, three or four days or nights per week. Many of Tower’s entry-level operators, technicians and engineers have degrees from community colleges and universities in Texas. Some hail from Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
University of California, Berkeley and Cambridge University.
Making chips
Making computer chips is a long, laborious process. Workers layer chemicals on silicon disks, etch them, implant ions to change the conductivity, or flow of electricity, in the silicon, and polish, heat and test the products, known as wafers. It takes two to three months to make 25 wafers.
On a recent Friday afternoon at the San Antonio facility, Rohn Rao, outfitted in a white protective suit, walked into a dustfree, climate-controlled “clean room” where a Canon FPA
3000 i4 Stepper used lightsensitive materials called “photoresists” to layer patterns, or “blueprints,” onto black wafers.
These look like vinyl records.
A nearby Lam Research machine sprayed chemicals on a batch of wafers — which carry 200 to 10,000 chips each, depending on customers’ specifications — to remove metals, oxides and nitride.
Rao, 59, said he moved to Texas from India to earn an associate degree in psychology at San Antonio College. A friend encouraged him to apply for a job at the plant in 1995, and he went for it. He began as an operator and was promoted over the years to trainer, lead operations manager and now sector manager in the 80,000square-foot Building 1.
Every workday, Rao steps into a pair of dust-free boots and pants, and pulls on a jacket and head cover, made of polyester. He then walks into an “air show
er” that blasts away particles.
“We can’t have anything land on the product, not even an eyelash,” Rao said.
In the clean room, where the temperature is held at 68 degree and humidity at 25 percent, he stood among technicians, also masked and suited, as they labored under dim yellow lights. The floor was pockmarked, and a high-efficiency air-filtration system hummed in the background, recycling oxygen six times per minute.
“On my first day, I thought, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ But now, I’m home in this environment,” Rao said.
Human resources director David Moss was on hand. Looking over the machinery, Moss, a 43-year-old son of an Iowa auto mechanic, said he’s fascinated with “the magic of making semiconductors.”
Making bank
Tower, a publicly traded company, operates two fabs in Israel, three in Japan, and recently announced it will open another in Italy under a joint venture. It employs about 5,500 workers, and has sales offices in China, Korea and Taiwan.
In the U.S., the manufacturer runs a fab in Newport Beach, Calif., in addition to its San Antonio operation. Locally, Tower is the only chipmaker in town.
In 2003, Japan’s Sony Corp. closed its Northwest Side semiconductor plant. The site is now home to the National Security Agency’s secretive Texas Cryptologic Center.
Tower’s plants are running at nearly full tilt.
Early in the pandemic, major automakers anticipated a drop in sales, closed their factories for weeks and canceled their orders for chips. In the meantime, makers of consumer products gobbled up chip supplies as homebound workers increased their online shopping. They bought a lot of laptops, video game systems and other electronics.