Heavy Metal ...

One of the machines used to etch materials from silicon wafers as chips are fabricated.

Heavy Metal, the process to fab chips is complex and intense to the max.

Chip makers are packing more and more transistors onto each piece of silicon, which is why technology does more each year. It’s also the reason that new chip factories cost billions and fewer companies can afford to build them.

In addition to paying for buildings and machinery, companies must spend heavily to develop the complex processing steps used to fabricate chips from plate-size silicon wafers — which is why the factories are called “fabs.”

The packaging process starts after the chips are fabbed and sealed.

Individual chips are stored on tape and reels before packaging. 
The chips will be attached to a packaging substrate.

Eventually, the chips go on a motherboard, ready to crunch bits as needs warrant.

Water water everywhere ...

Hillsboro’s water treatment plant. Chip making requires millions of gallons of water a day.

Fabs are water-intensive operations. That’s because water is needed to clean wafers at many stages of the production process.

Intel’s two sites in Chandler collectively draw about 11 million gallons of water a day from the local utility. Intel’s future expansion will require considerably more, a seeming challenge for a drought-plagued state like Arizona, which has cut water allocations to farmers. But farming actually consumes much more water than a chip plant.

Building the fabs before any chip is fabricated is equally as intense.

Cranes moving construction materials at the Chandler site.
The cranes will lift, among other things, 55-ton chillers for the new fabs.

To build its future factories, Intel will need roughly 5,000 skilled construction workers for three years.

They have a lot to do. Excavating the foundations is expected to remove 890,000 cubic yards of dirt, carted away at a rate of one dump truck per minute, said Dan Doron, Intel’s construction chief.

The company expects to pour more than 445,000 cubic yards of concrete and use 100,000 tons of reinforcement steel for the foundations — more than in constructing the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

Some cranes for the construction are so large that more than 100 trucks are needed to bring the pieces to assemble them, Mr. Doron said. The cranes will lift, among other things, 55-ton chillers for the new fabs.

Heavy metal indeed.