Anyone who enters factories must wear a bunny suit and dress – or dress down – in a tidy room. Makeup, hair products, perfumes, colognes and any aerosol products are prohibited. The workers are divided according to the metallurgical hierarchy: there are those who work with copper and those who do not. Copperheads wear orange rather than white suits and must put them on and take them off in their own tidy room.
The Intel factory worker who helped me put on the suit proudly told me that he had done the same for two American presidents: Obama, who visited Fab 42, and Biden, who visited Fab 52 while it was being built. As of slow September, Trump still had not visited the company, although Intel spokesman Cory Pforzheimer said, “We would look forward to welcoming President Trump to see the most advanced research and development facilities and leading semiconductor manufacturing in the U.S.”
Moving workers do not so much pull levers and refine production modes as they quietly manage robots. They stand at (sterilized) computer stations while containers called front-opening unified pods, or FOUPs, zoom overhead on a maze of robotic tracks. The rows of equipment seem endless. The floor below was reinforced and then reinforced again because the slightest shock could destroy an entire batch of chips.
The lithograph section of the object is bathed in a strange glow that turned our white suits neon green and the people in copper suits pink. Intel has requested that fantasy tourists not share the names of their suppliers, except for one: ASML, the Dutch manufacturer of the world’s most advanced lithography machines. WIRED witnessed two huge ASML Twinscan machines that appeared to be working. The floor next to them was marked with tape, marking space for two more.
Intel has not yet publicly stated how many semiconductors it expects to successfully source or produce at the Fab 52 rate per year. For now, the chips produced there will be used in consumer devices such as laptops. But what Intel really needs is what the entire industry is chasing: a hyperscale customer, a giant data center deal, someone willing to spend billions to get ahead in AI. whale.
Project overview
Intel’s Panther Lake and Clearwater Forest chips will be produced in a manufacturing process that jettisons decades of proven design techniques in favor of two fresh technologies the company calls RibbonFET and PowerVia. RibbonFet architectures transistors, stacking them in a way that allows for greater density, while PowerVia moves power interconnects above the silicon stacks in the chip below them.
Intel began working on a fresh design approach in 2021, and early testing showed that RibbonFet and PowerVia led to performance increase. Reports suggest that these fresh chips will also be used 30 percent less energy than the previous generation.