Everyone who enters the fabs has to wear a bunny suit, and get dressed—or be dressed—in a clean room. Makeup, hair products, perfumes, colognes, and any aerosol products are prohibited. Workers are separated by a metallurgical hierarchy: There are those who work with copper, and those who do not. The copper people wear orange suits, not white, and have to suit up and strip down in their own clean room.
The Intel fab worker who helped me suit up proudly told me that he has done the same for two US presidents: Obama, who visited Fab 42, and Biden, who visited Fab 52 while it was under construction. As of late September, Trump still hadn’t visited, though Intel spokesperson Cory Pforzheimer said, “We’d eagerly welcome President Trump to see the most advanced R&D and leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing in the US.”
The workers shuffling around are not pulling levers and grinding away at the gears of manufacturing as much as quietly managing robots. They stand at (sterilized) computer stations while containers called front-opening unified pods, or FOUPs, whoosh by overhead through a labyrinth of robotic tracks. The rows of equipment appear endless. The floor below has been reinforced, then reinforced again, because the tiniest of shakes can ruin a whole batch of chips.
The lithography section of the facility is awash in a strange glow, which turned our white suits neon green and the copper-suited people pink. Intel demanded that the fab tourists not share the names of its suppliers, with the exception of one: ASML, the Dutch manufacturer of the world’s most cutting-edge lithography machines. WIRED witnessed two massive ASML Twinscan machines that appeared to be operational. The floor next to them was tape-marked with space for two more.
Intel has not yet publicly said how many semiconductors it expects to successfully yield, or manufacture, at Fab 52 annually. For now, the chips produced there will be used in consumer devices like laptops. But what Intel really needs is the same thing the entire industry is chasing: A hyperscaler customer, a giant data center deal, someone looking to spend billions to get an edge in AI. A whale.
Design Overhaul
Intel’s Panther Lake and Clearwater Forest chips will be made using a manufacturing process that tosses aside decades of proven design techniques in favor of two new technologies the company calls RibbonFET and PowerVia. RibbonFet is an architecture for transistors, stacking them in a way that allows for more density, while PowerVia moves the power interconnects from above the silicon stacks in the chip to below them.
Intel began working on the new design approach in 2021, and early tests have shown that RibbonFet and PowerVia led to performance gains. Reports suggest these new chips also use 30 percent less energy than the prior generation.
