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Intel On A Building Spree

Posted by Hemos on from the building-for-the-future dept.

Anonymous Cowherd writes "Intel will build two new facilities - a new chip plant and a new wafer plant. The new chip plant will be built in Kiryat Gat, Israel, continuing Intel's 30 years operation in the country. Intel already owns several facilities in Israel, both for R&D and for manufacturing. Previous developments of Intel Israel are the 8088 processor, MMX and the Centrino mobile platform. The new wafer plant will be built in an existing facility at Chandler, Arizona, and will feature 45nm technology - 1/1,333th the width of a human hair. The technology is two generations ahead of the current 90nm. Intel's Arizona operation includes production of the Pentium processor family and related chipsets."

9 of 298 comments (clear)

  1. Oh, bloody great use of numbers by gardyloo · · Score: 5, Informative

    The new wafer plant will be built in an existing facility at Chandler, Arizona, and will feature 45nm technology - 1/1,333th the width of a human hair.

          Yay for science writers using numbers in dumb ways. So glad that all humans have all the same hair thicknesses, and they're all about 59.99 microns. According to various sources (and I've measured hair diameters myself), they range from 200microns down to about 50 microns. So the article should have stated that the 45 nm technology is somewhere between 9/10000th and 9/40000th the width of a human hair. Wouldn't that be much more impressive? /sarcasm

  2. Water by said_captain_said_wo · · Score: 4, Informative

    What is the estimate of how much water these plants will consume? Do the communities in which these plants are being put understand what the impact will be? Chip fabs usually consume lots of water.

    Links from google:
    1 2 3

    1. Re:Water by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Actually we dump the water back into the community. The loss is trivial.

      And, due to regulations, the water is cleaner when we dump it than when we input it into the factory. Now, the question is "why not just recycle the water?" If the fabrication process wasn't black magic this would make sense. But, we really don't understand what affects yeild. So, once yeild is high you are not allowed to change anything. When it is low, change whatever you want.

      Intel after all is not an engineering company. It is a manufacturing company.

  3. Re:ob. google troll: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Actually the two existing wafer fabs are south of that location (near Queen Creek Blvd). That site is offices and R&D

  4. Perhaps not... by crt · · Score: 4, Informative

    Actually it's not clear if they are building anything new in Israel, as the Updated article mentions.

  5. Re:Intel Israel by great+om · · Score: 2, Informative

    motorola does a significant amount of fabing in israel. Particularly CPU's and small electronics for other corporations. Don't know why... must be all the sand

    --
    ------- Oh damn.... the Sigfile escaped... -Great OM
  6. the same thing by phsdv · · Score: 2, Informative
    Intel will build two new facilities - a new chip plant and a new wafer plant

    This anouncement makes it sound that the two fabs are making different things, chips and wafers. However all chips or made on wafers so in this context a wafer fab is also a chip fab and visa versa.

    Why do people write about things without knowing what they talk about? Or at least try to find out, before writing something down.

  7. As weird as it sounds by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    The official Intel page states otherwise
    http://www.intel.com/jobs/israel/sites/haifa.htm

    The pioneering 8088 processor, Intel® math coprocessors, the i860® XP processor, Ethernet communication chips, and cache and memory controllers are a few of the more than 50 products designed in IDC (Israel Development Center)

    So it sounds like both of them were developed there

  8. Re:target (of) opportunity... by otis+wildflower · · Score: 5, Informative

    Qiyrat Gat seems to be about 10 miles from the West Bank, and 15 miles from the Gaza border.

    Dude, there's no spot in Israel that isn't at most 25 miles from some pissed off Arab. It's a pretty small country, about 80% the size of Maryland, give or take a settlement.