Everyone who enters the factories must wear a bunny suit and dress – or be dressed – in a clean room. Makeup, hair products, perfumes, colognes and any aerosol products are prohibited. The workers are separated by a metallurgical hierarchy: there are those who work copper and those who do not. The copper people wear orange suits, not white, and must dress and undress in their own clean room.
The Intel employee who helped me get dressed proudly told me he had done the same thing for two U.S. presidents: Obama, who visited Fab 42, and Biden, who visited Fab 52 while it was under construction. As of late September, Trump still had not come, although Intel spokesman Cory Pforzheimer said, “We would look forward to President Trump to see the most advanced R&D and manufacturing of cutting-edge semiconductors in the United States.” »
Workers who move around do not pull levers or work on the cogs of manufacturing, but quietly manage robots. They stand in front of (sterilized) computer stations while containers called front-opening unified pods, or FOUPs, pass overhead through a maze of robotic tracks. The rows of equipment seem endless. The ground underneath was reinforced, then reinforced again, because the slightest shake can destroy an entire batch of chips.
The lithography section of the installation is flooded with a strange glow, which has turned our white suits neon green and the people in copper suits pink. Intel demanded that tourist fabs not disclose the names of its suppliers, except for one: ASML, the Dutch manufacturer of the world’s most advanced lithography machines. WIRED witnessed two massive ASML Twinscan machines that appeared operational. The floor next to them was marked with space for two more.
Intel has not yet publicly announced how many semiconductors it hopes to produce or successfully manufacture at Fab 52 each year. For now, the chips produced there will be used in consumer devices like laptops. But what Intel really needs is the same thing the entire industry is looking for: a hyperscaler customer, a giant data center deal, someone looking to spend billions to gain an advantage in AI. A whale.
Design review
Intel’s Panther Lake and Clearwater Forest chips will be made using a manufacturing process that abandons decades of proven design techniques in favor of two new technologies the company calls RibbonFET and PowerVia. RibbonFet is an architecture for transistors, stacking them in a way to allow for greater density, while PowerVia moves power interconnects from above the chip’s silicon stacks to below.
Intel began working on the new design approach in 2021, and early testing showed that RibbonFet and PowerVia resulted in performance gains. Reports suggest that these new chips also consume 30% less power than the previous generation.
