To date, Fab 32 is 64 percent complete. Approximately 2,800 skilled construction workers are working different shifts six days a week, 20 hours per day. At the end of October, approximately 800 workers began installing the factory’s first analytical tools, which are close in size to a refrigerator. They are also hooking up equipment to electrical and drain lines, running chemicals through the tools and starting to move in implanters and steppers, which are the size of mobile mini-storage containers—the typical size of a 300 mm piece of equipment. Manufacturing with wafers 300 mm in diameter (about 12 inches), dramatically increases the ability to produce semiconductors at a lower cost compared with more widely used 200 mm (eight inch) wafers. The total silicon surface area of a 300 mm wafer is 225 percent, or more than twice that of a 200 mm wafer, and the number of individual computer chips is increased 240 percent. The bigger wafers lower the production cost per chip, while diminishing overall use of resources. A 300 mm wafer manufacturing factory uses 40 percent less energy and water per chip than a 200 mm wafer factory.
Once the tools are installed, workers will put them through a qualification process to assure the tools match the method developed in Portland, Oregon. “Part of our mission is to match output of the factory in Oregon,” says Preston McDaniel, senior program manager and project manager for Fab 32. “They give us criteria we have to match and achieving that exact match is the hardest part of the process. The geometry and precision it takes to run this technology makes it challenging from an engineering perspective to achieve an exact equivalent.”
McDaniel adds tool installation will take about a year and is extremely labor intensive, so Intel will ramp up to 1,500 construction workers including equipment suppliers from Japan, Europe and the East Coast. As more equipment arrives and it becomes more of an Intel-driven project rather than a construction project, they will also switch the plant to operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Dawn Jones, external communications manager at Intel, contends the company has not had a single neighborhood complaint related to the establishment of Fab 32, or construction traffic, since construction began in August 2005. “This is a remarkable record considering construction and related traffic is taking place in close proximity to homes in the upscale communities of Ocotillo and Sun Lakes,” says Jones. “We’ve also had zero complaints from Maricopa County regarding dust control at the construction site. We spray 150,000 gallons of water per day on the site.”
When Fab 32 opens this year, it will be Intel’s sixth 300 mm wafer facility. Similar factories are located in Oregon, New Mexico and Ireland. The facility will be about one million square feet with 184,000 square feet of clean room space. Chips are fabricated in clean rooms that are 10,000 times cleaner than hospital operating rooms. As part of the clean room protocol, manufacturing technicians wear “bunny suits,” which are white gowns made of special fabrics. The suits help to protect the chips during fabrication by keeping contaminants such as dirt, hair and skin out of the clean room.
In view of the fact that Fab 32 will need about 1,000 highly skilled employees to operate, Intel has been hiring and training workers with experience in high technology, semi-conductors, military electronics, as well as engineers, since they announced the project. Intel workers from other facilities have also filled many of the positions. Since the work at Fab 32 is Intel’s latest technology, the company’s recent layoffs will not have an effect on the new facility.
Since Intel’s manufacturing process is extremely complicated, Fab 32 employees will be sent to one of the three factories for a six- to eight-month training assignment on a particular tool. Employees also get dispatched to other manufacturing facilities that run the 300 mm process, so they can increase their skill set.
“Technical training is a very large undertaking, so we are spending a lot of time and money to make the technology transfer successfully,” notes John Pemberton, plant manager of Fab 32.

www.intel.com