INDUSTRY NEWS

A hands-on tour

What chipmaker whose name is synonymous with leading-edge technology uses Play-Doh to help fab visitors understand how a semiconductor is made? Intel does, according to the cover story in the January 2000 issue of Smithsonian.

In "Making the Chips that Run the World," Jake Page relates how he helped make a multilayered mock microprocessor "from variously colored bits of Play-Doh" in Intel's Functional Area Macro Overview Class. A reporter who lives near an Intel site in New Mexico, Page says local news accounts of the new 218-acre site and its $4000-per-sq-ft costs fueled his curiosity.

A bunnysuited Page toured Intel's Class 1 Fab 11. Page's first-person account deftly mixes gee-whiz descriptions for the layman and enough technical jargon to convey the science and art of making a microprocessor. For some reason, he capitalizes the word fab, as though it were a German noun. "On first entering a Fab, a newbie will be forgiven for imagining he or she has entered a 21st-century James Bond movie," Page gushes. Taken on a tour by Ann Tiao, an in-line defect engineer, he learns about ionizers and $5 million process tools.

Finally, granted an audience with chairman emeritus Gordon Moore, Page reveals that Moore's famous "doubling law" was just a way of trying to "startle the world." Moore, writes Page, "was surprised and delighted to find that it had, in fact, worked out that way."

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