I'm Pat Dorris. Welcome to the story. We're starting out tonight in a place that I haven't been in my 34 years as a reporter in Oregon, a fab at Intel. That's why the light's yellow and we have the bunny suits. We're here because they're unveiling this brand new machine that's so complicated. The manufacturer had to send 250 Texan engineers to live here for six months to put the thing together. But before we get too far into that part of the story, let's widen our focus a bit. Intel is a high tech giant in Oregon. Its headquarters are in California but its biggest head count is right here in Oregon and its four campuses in Hillsboro take semiconductor chips from the imagination of engineers to research and then development and then early manufacturing and some mass production before the blueprint is passed on to other Intel sites around the world. The company reports it has 22,000 employees in Oregon and supports another 100,000 jobs. It spent $4 billion with Oregon based suppliers and invested $59 billion in its Oregon plants over the years. It's one of the leading semiconductor companies in the world, developing the chips that run many of the world's data centers and P CS. It's engineers and developers pushing to expand the boundaries of what's possible following Moore's law, which says the number of transistors on a single chip would double every two years with minimal increase in cost. But over the last five years, it's had its ups and downs, as you can see from the value of the stock from a high of $68 a share. It more recently traded around $36 a share. But Intel is pushing to turn that around investing $100 billion in American factories and innovation. In late March, the company learned it had secured $8.5 billion from the Biden administration along with another 11 billion in loans to help bring chip manufacturing back to America. We know its CEO Pat Gelsinger celebrated with President Biden at a fab under construction in Arizona, you know, and today is a victory for Americans national economy but also our national security. It's a victory for American innovation. Intel said the money will be used for fabs and research centers in Arizona, Ohio, New Mexico and Oregon, which brings us back to that new machine in Hillsboro. It arrived in several cargo planes around the first of the year flying into Seattle from a company called A SML in the Netherlands, 250 crates in 43 freight containers were loaded onto 20 semi trucks for the trip to Oregon. I was there in January as the first pieces began arriving at Intel's Gordon Moore Park. The big crates concealed some of the most sophisticated engineering in the world. The machine from a SML is called a high N A EU V tool right now, Intel is the only corporation in the world with this machine which trade publications said cost around 380 million. Ryan Russell was one of the many on hand for its arrival. He runs the group responsible for Intel's next generation fab process development. We are the people driving Moore's law for Intel. The tool will allow them to drive it further. When we make semiconductors, we start out with a piece of silicon and then we put a pattern down on it and we develop that pattern into the silicon and then we basically rinse and repeat that. So it's a lot like building a skyscraper we come in, you basically put down one floor, you develop it, then you construct the second floor, you construct the third floor all the way up. This machine is how we basically put down the pattern for what we're going to make on that floor. The high N A EU V machine allows them to make the microscopic features on a chip even smaller while keeping everything accurate. So it will make things smaller. But the second thing that this tool brings to us is a lot more precision in where we put those items. And that becomes very important. If I go back to the skyscraper analogy, uh when you build that first floor, you're going to have an elevator ship on it. When you put that second floor down, you need to, not only we're trying to make it smaller, but we need those elevator shafts to stack up on top of each other. If, if they're not lined up all the way up through the building, you can't actually run an elevator car up through it. So this machine vastly improves the capability that we have to place that elevator shaft and to make sure that as we stack them up, they work, some chips have up to a billion transistors on them. Now, this could push that number higher. It took several weeks to put the high N A Eu V machine together. But by mid April it was mostly in place and ready to go, which is when Intel offered me a tour of its D one X fab in Hillsboro before going into a clean room atmosphere. I had to don the bunny suit. It included a head cover and two layers of shoe covers and gloves and a suit that would keep all my debris inside. They were protecting the super clean environment from me. The machines are so finely tuned, so precise that a single human hair in the wrong place could really mess things up walking through the fab at Gordon Moore is amazing. It's four football fields long and four football fields wide. It's full of expensive machines. Intel says it costs roughly $10 billion to build an outfit. A fab like this. It takes three years to complete. The machines are the ones doing all the work with the silicon wafers. The people are monitoring the machines. One of the people I met here is Mary Houston. She joined Intel after her junior year of high school. 40 years ago, I imagine you've seen a lot of changes. A lot of changes. The biggest change has been the implementation of the automation systems and the wafer size, the factory size a lot different. She used to walk 10 miles a day in the fab but now an overhead system carrying the silicon wafers makes that unnecessary. Eventually our tour arrived at that high N A EU V tool. It's big when you see it up close about the size of a tennis court. It has 100,000 parts and weighs nearly 200 tons. But it's what happens inside where you can't see it. That's so amazing. Remember Moore's Law, it came from Intel co-founder, Gordon Moore and states that the number of transistors squeezed onto a single chip should double every two years. It makes them more powerful and cheaper. At the same time to do that, the transistors have become microscopic, to print a pattern for the transistors. And other components. Chip companies use lithography machines. They project circuit patterns onto a special coating that's on the silicon wafers. Over the years, they've made the wavelength of light shorter and shorter on lithography which allowed them to print features for even smaller transistors. It was amazing for me to look at a silicon wafer and imagine all the engineering and science that's gone into making each tiny square to make the transistors even tinier still industry needs lithography machines with even shorter wavelengths. The kind that do not naturally exist extreme ultraviolet light is artificial and it has to be made. That's part of what this tool does because it's so massive. It needs three floors in the fab. It has a powerful laser that sits one floor below its beam 15 times the power of lasers used to cut steel. A beam transport sends the laser up a floor to the Eu V machine where a generator fires tiny drops of metal tin into a vacuum. Each drop one third as thick as a human hair. Yeah, small. The laser flashing 50,000 times a second hits the tin droplet and vaporizes it into a plasma and that plasma releases light in the extreme ultraviolet range. A collector mirror catches the EU V light and shoots it to a scanner. There. It bounces off extremely precise mirrors that shape the light into slits that create patterns of transistors and connectors on a silicon Wafer. Intel says it could be two or three years before it begins making chips with this machine. They will be called 14 A and among the most advanced in the world used for A I. And much more, the folks at Intel are pretty excited about this machine for what it means to the company and to Oregon. I think it's a huge deal and just further cements the fact that this site is the home of Intel's research and development. It is where we invest in and do components research on the next generation leading edge technology. And the fact that this tool is now here and becoming part of our process is just further evidence of how we are working on regaining that process, technology leadership. And all of that is really starting here in Hillsboro in our backyard. I got to tell you it was fascinating being there and that yellow light, by the way, it's used to keep the silicon wafers safe. They would actually be damaged by normal white lights. Also, Intel has been historically very private about its factories and its process, but now they're beginning to open up a little bit and I'm glad they are since there's such a huge influence on Oregon's economy, part of the future that they envision are chips so powerful that you could say goodbye to a lot of cloud computing that happens when files or programs are too big for your computer. So they go into the cloud. Intel thinks in the future, you'll be able to easily keep those files and programs on your computer and out of the cloud making everything a lot faster. They also imagine future chip making things like virtual reality headsets much better with fluid motion and dense stunning graphics. In addition to all that, they're creating a new company where they will use their factories to make other companies chips, they call it Intel Foundry. It's all part of the future. And today you got a glimpse of how Oregon's biggest private company plans to get there. So what's going through your mind on all this impressed by Intel's new fantastic tool. Why or why not? You know, the drill, email us. The address is the story at kgw.com or call and leave a voicemail. The number is 5032265090.
