- 6 hours ago
We got rare access inside Intel's semiconductor operation in Oregon to see how some of America's most advanced chips are made. As tensions with China rise, Washington is betting on Intel, the only American company that both designs and manufactures advanced chips in the US, to help rebuild domestic chipmaking. We visited its cleanroom, its R&D lab, and a packaging operation no media had ever visited before to see how Intel plans to do it.
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00:00We're about to enter one of the most controlled factories on Earth,
00:05a place where a single wrong atom can ruin America's most advanced chips.
00:12And some of the rooms we're going into are so closely guarded,
00:16no media has ever set foot inside.
00:21There's like a secret code to unlock the door.
00:24Intel has to keep this factory 1,000 times cleaner than a surgical room.
00:31So what if a hair, for example, got into one of the machines?
00:34A hair is huge.
00:35Today, it's hard to imagine a world without chips.
00:38They run chatbots, fighter jets, AI data centers, even this device I'm talking through.
00:45But right now, the U.S. has a big problem.
00:49Even though America designs many of the world's most advanced chips,
00:55about 90% of them are made in Taiwan.
00:59But building chip factories is brutally expensive.
01:03And inside, just one machine costs $400 million.
01:08A single facility needs rows upon rows of them.
01:12That's why the U.S. government is investing in Intel to make more chips in America.
01:18We went to the factory at the heart of this comeback mission.
01:22And asked the question at the center of the global chip race.
01:26If, for example, something happened with Taiwan and China,
01:31how vulnerable do you think the semiconductor supply chain is today?
01:41Semiconductor factories are called fabrication plants, or fabs.
01:46And almost every inch of this sprawling space is engineered to protect what's going on inside.
01:53A process so sensitive, you can't wear just anything in.
01:58So no lotion, no hairspray, no makeup, no spray deodorant either.
02:02So I don't know how we're going to be smelling at the end of today, but we'll just have to
02:06see.
02:07All right, let's go. This is really exciting.
02:10Before we could even start shooting, our gear needed a total wipe down.
02:16Cleanliness is so important.
02:17Intel keeps a whole room full of $1,000 suits to make sure no one gets past this point dirty.
02:24Each little tiny speck can cause a defect, which would destroy the chip.
02:29Chris Auth is in charge of making sure that doesn't happen.
02:33So you're going to want to scrunch up your suit so that the sleeves don't touch the ground here.
02:37Just to keep any particles that may be on the floor from your booties off of your hand area.
02:43And then we tighten it up. Snap it up front.
02:46So now we're going to put some latex gloves over our previous gloves. One more layer of cleanliness.
02:52Almost ready to go. Make sure none of my hand particles escape.
02:56But if one rogue particle does, these holes in the floor would suck it out.
03:00So if I were to sneeze, for example, how fast would that exit this room?
03:07It would move very quickly. Probably in less than a minute.
03:10There's 12 football fields of clean room space here.
03:14And so keeping that all clean is one of the most expensive things that you'll do.
03:18The room I'm sitting in right now has millions of particles floating in every cubic meter of air.
03:25But the room you're about to see us walk into can't have more than eight particles.
03:31As soon as you step inside, you realize that even the wrong kind of light can destroy a chip.
03:38Some of the materials that we use are very sensitive to white light.
03:42Which is why they use yellow lighting throughout their factories.
03:46And it totally messes with your sense of reality.
03:50So I got really excited when we first walked in here because there are so many things that look bright
03:56pink.
03:56But in reality, here in this factory under yellow lighting, everything that is actually red looks very pink to our
04:03eyes.
04:03So we're going to show you that. We're going to change our white balance on our cameras to normal.
04:09And this is what it would actually look like if these lights weren't yellow.
04:13So I'm devastated.
04:16Sorry.
04:17The whole complicated chip making process starts with something deceptively simple.
04:23So this is one of the very first steps that it is.
04:26So the wafer is blank.
04:27You can see how shiny it is up at the top.
04:30The wafer is basically a thin slice of silicon, a material that comes from sand.
04:35It's the base layer the chip gets built on.
04:38But for the chip to work, this silicon has to be 99.999999999% pure.
04:49What would happen if it wasn't?
04:52If it was like 98% pure?
04:55So what the contaminants can do is that they can interfere with the electrical connections in the transistors.
05:01And it will cause that chip to fail when we would have to throw that away.
05:05That might not sound like a big deal.
05:07Until you realize how expensive that mistake can be.
05:11You're somewhere in the $50,000 to $500,000 just for one wafer.
05:15Now you think of it, it's in a whole box of 25 wafers.
05:19So now you're into the millions for just one box.
05:22So yes, mistakes are very costly.
05:23It takes about three months and everything going exactly right for this wafer to become a chip.
05:32And in all that time, no human will ever touch it.
05:37Robots move the wafers along the ceiling to keep them safe.
05:41You have some of the largest factories that are making some of the world's smallest features.
05:46From start to finish, the wafer will travel hundreds of miles on these tracks as it turns into a chip.
05:52And it will move along, it will stop at a tool, do some processing.
05:56And then when that's done, it will go back up and then you'll move to the next step.
06:00The work has gotten more intricate over the years.
06:04Chips these days are barely bigger than a fingernail.
06:09That's why there's literally no room for error.
06:12You have about 2,000 steps and you need every step to be perfect.
06:16A bump or ridge in the silicon can interfere with the patterns they have to make.
06:21Which is why the wafer visits this machine to get flatter and flatter.
06:26Until it's quite literally one of the flattest things ever made.
06:31And so any vibration, you and I walking by, the tool next to it vibrating can impact the process.
06:37And if you look at all of these tools, they actually sit on top of a pedestal.
06:41The whole factory is engineered to barely move.
06:45Its foundation uses twice as much concrete as the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building.
06:52Because if this place shakes, it's not just a few dozen wafers that get destroyed.
06:58Tens of thousands of wafers are at risk.
07:01Yeah, the automation that you have keeps track of where each lot is and what it needs to do next
07:07is a whole art form in itself.
07:10When they add a new layer to a wafer, they often have to send it back to machines like this
07:15one.
07:16Which polishes the surface and clears away anything that doesn't belong.
07:21The layer they're building next holds one of the most important parts of the chip.
07:26The transistor.
07:28So what are we actually able to see here?
07:31These are the wires that connect each of the transistors to each other.
07:36Just one of these squares contains 10 billion transistors.
07:41They are microscopic and work like an electric switch that turns on and off.
07:47The closer you pack the transistors together, the faster the current can travel throughout the chip.
07:54And the less power it uses.
07:56Which makes the chip more valuable.
08:00Very much how you would build a city, you know, with very tall skyscrapers.
08:04We will put layer upon layer of these skyscrapers up.
08:07If you stacked 10,000 of them, one on top of another, it'd be thinner than a sheet of a
08:14piece of paper.
08:15There's only one type of machine on Earth that can build structures that small efficiently.
08:21And only one company that can make it.
08:23ASML headquartered in the Netherlands.
08:26They run somewhere in the range of 200 million to upwards of 400 million dollars just for one tool.
08:32You're over a billion dollars worth of tools just in this short walk here.
08:37Inside this machine, lasers create one of the world's rarest forms of ultraviolet light.
08:43That draws tiny patterns into the wafer.
08:47And then you need tens of these tools in order to really have an operation that you can scale and
08:53create chips at a high level.
08:54It's a very, very expensive game.
08:56We had to blur the names on the other equipment Intel uses, because that can reveal sensitive details about its
09:03process.
09:04Today, only a handful of chip makers have these kinds of tools.
09:08And Intel started using them at scale years after its biggest rivals, TSMC and Samsung.
09:16Without these tools, a chip maker needs more steps to make the smallest patterns, slowing production and making their factory
09:25less competitive.
09:27That's why this race is not just about having tools like these.
09:31It's about how fast you can upgrade them.
09:34Every two to three years, you probably replace 20, 30 percent of the tools.
09:39Yeah, you're well into the billions of dollars each generation in order to be able to keep the factory at
09:45the leading edge.
09:47This time, Intel was the first to buy the newest version of this machine, worth about 400 million dollars.
09:54That means it can be the first in the business to print even smaller patterns quickly.
10:00But here's the catch.
10:02That alone won't necessarily put Intel ahead.
10:05The secret sauce is how you integrate this machine with all the other thousand machines that are in here and
10:12create one process flow.
10:14That process helps determine what kind of chip you can make.
10:18And you need to make sure it will be the one everyone wants.
10:22Because once you optimize a factory for one type of chip, pivoting is hard.
10:28How do you ensure that the process that's going on here is aligned with where the market is going?
10:36That's always a tricky one because if you go back, say, even three, four years ago, did we expect the
10:41explosion of AI as it was?
10:43No. And AI is going to have different characteristics that they want than, say, a cell phone manufacturer.
10:49So they want the process to be a little different.
10:52And so you do kind of try to look ahead and say, hey, how do we want to design this
10:55process?
10:55That's the gamble chip makers have faced from the beginning.
11:00The U.S. invented semiconductor chips in the 1950s.
11:05And for a long time, it dominated this industry.
11:09Intel, founded in 1968 in California, was at the forefront.
11:14It was the first to put the most important parts of a computer onto a single chip and sell it
11:21commercially.
11:22One result? Computers that once filled rooms now occupy cabinet space.
11:29For a long time, Intel was better at making those chips than almost anyone.
11:33It is not every day that we introduce a new microprocessor generation. It just seems like it.
11:39By the 1990s, Intel had become the biggest semiconductor manufacturer in the world.
11:45But that was about to change.
11:48Because Intel's factories were mostly optimized for building chips for PCs.
11:54This symbol outside means you have the standard inside that an entire library of software has been written to.
12:04Behind the scenes, Apple was building what would become the biggest device in decades.
12:10The iPhone.
12:12But it needed different chips.
12:15In the mid-2000s, Apple gave Intel a shot at building them.
12:18But Intel walked away from the deal, betting on PCs instead, right as the market was about to shift away
12:26from them.
12:27Intel was reportedly hesitant to invest in the massive factory pivot needed to make Apple's chips.
12:35It was splitting its budget between designing chips, which is super expensive, and manufacturing them too.
12:43While many chip companies had already chosen to specialize in one or the other.
12:48Most manufacturers were based in Asia, where labor was cheaper.
12:53These factories could dump their entire budgets into upgrading tools and pivoting if a chip designer in the US needed
13:01them to.
13:02So they ended up with more deals.
13:05That's how Taiwan's Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC, rose to the top.
13:12Today, chip companies turned to TSMC more than any other manufacturer, giving it control of about 70% of the
13:20foundry market.
13:21But the US government now sees this as a major geopolitical risk.
13:26Taiwan governs itself, but China claims it as its own and has repeatedly threatened to take it by force.
13:34If conflict breaks out on the island, the US could lose access to many of its most advanced chips almost
13:42overnight.
13:43So whoever controls that supply would hold enormous leverage over the technology that runs the world.
13:49There is vulnerability in every part of the supply chain.
13:53It could be materials related.
13:55It could be equipment manufacturing related.
13:58That's why Washington is pushing for more chip making in the US, sometimes deploying tariffs as a threat.
14:06It also offered TSMC financial incentives, including tax credits, to build new plants in America.
14:14But the company is headquartered in Taiwan.
14:17And a lot of its most advanced manufacturing is still based there.
14:23That's why Intel's comeback matters.
14:25Intel's invested heavily in improving that supply chain resiliency.
14:30It's more local for local.
14:32Made in America versus American made is something that we should really think much harder on.
14:39So far, Washington has pledged about $11 billion to help Intel build back up.
14:46Even taking a 10% stake in the company.
14:50But even with government help, building a fab in the US costs about 10% more than it does in
14:56Taiwan.
14:57And running it is about 35% more expensive.
15:01And while Intel itself has set aside $100 billion to build plants across America in the coming years, its rival
15:09TSMC has gone even bigger.
15:12Budgeting $165 billion into its US build-out.
15:16So what would you say to the skeptics that say Intel Foundry can't compete?
15:24I don't see it as a competition with TSMC or Samsung.
15:28When we look at the future, the demand is going to continue to grow for semiconductors.
15:35And there's going to be a need for continued innovation.
15:38When we talk about semiconductors in the United States, everyone thinks manufacturing.
15:43Because yes, manufacturing brings more jobs.
15:47Manufacturing has more scale.
15:49Manufacturing builds huge facilities.
15:50But the engine behind manufacturing is technology development.
15:56We are staying ahead of technology development.
15:59With that strategy, Intel hopes it will be ready for whatever innovation is coming next.
16:05And that could attract customers like Apple and Nvidia.
16:09That's why they're putting a lot of money and thought into R&D.
16:15Okay, so right now we're in Intel's research lab.
16:18And this place is wild.
16:20Because researchers here are basically looking at the periodic table of elements
16:24and trying to figure out which ones we'll be using in the chips 5, 10 years from now.
16:29So this is like America's test kitchen.
16:32That's Myung Hee Na.
16:33She leads the team that's figuring out what the next big shipmaking process needs to look like.
16:40And a lot of that work happens inside these tools.
16:44I'm going to get to put my hands through one of these things.
16:48Okay, so why do we need these farm thingies?
16:52Oh, great question.
16:53So a lot of the things that we work on are sensitive to oxygen and water.
16:58These materials aren't even used in chips yet.
17:02Secret sauce.
17:02Yeah.
17:03This is your secret sauce.
17:05Secret sauce.
17:05How rudimentary it looks, it's actually our most advanced materials.
17:12So the reason why researchers are looking at new materials is because in chipmaking,
17:18it's not just about how the machines work.
17:20It's also what you put into them.
17:23Every layer of the chip needs its own mix of chemicals and elements.
17:28And figuring out what those are is especially important right now.
17:32Because the ones the industry relies on today are starting to reach their atomic limits.
17:38This is a bare silicon.
17:40The cooling rail in my industry and everybody's dreams about it is as you go scaling down and down and
17:49down, silicon hits the limit.
17:51In other words, silicon got the industry incredibly far.
17:56But if chips are going to keep advancing, researchers need something better.
18:03Imagination is the limit.
18:04Imagination is the limit.
18:04And we are looking for new materials to enable the next generation of channel devices.
18:12So what are we looking at?
18:14This is the new materials we are talking about.
18:16We are really doing the experiment to see whether there is a value proposition of the next generation channel devices.
18:23This is our playground for a lot of things, yes.
18:25But sometimes it takes a lot of failed experiments to find the perfect material.
18:32Many, many, many millions.
18:34I always believe that fail is not failure in R&D.
18:40Over in Taiwan, TSMC is doing this research too.
18:44And that's one reason why speed matters so much.
18:49If Intel can find the next big materials and start developing the whole manufacturing process around them first,
18:56then it could become the foundry for big chip designers like Nvidia and Apple.
19:02But a breakthrough like that also takes the right mix of minds.
19:06Only time you actually see, wow, I never thought about it, is when you actually collect people together.
19:14Think very different ways, different backgrounds, and different cultures.
19:19And then it actually comes from the different answers to the problem set.
19:23I think you can underestimate diversity.
19:26A lot of that diversity comes from other countries.
19:29But now, big US tech companies, including Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, say it could get harder to bring in
19:38that global talent.
19:39The Trump administration says it wants to prioritize American workers.
19:44And has imposed new restrictions on the H-1B visa that allows employers to hire skilled foreign workers.
19:52A majority of these visas go to tech-related roles.
19:55But now, companies need to dish out a $100,000 fee for certain new petitions.
20:02No more will these big tech companies or other big companies train foreign workers.
20:08As a result, some tech companies have been training up Americans.
20:13Some of this talent is not readily available.
20:17And they might not be exactly suited to the semiconductor technology,
20:21but we can mold them through the training process that Intel has.
20:26We are doing it as an up-skilling for talent in US, in America.
20:31And inside Intel's labs, keeping talent interested means giving people space to test ideas.
20:38We can test a lot of different things in this lab.
20:42And then once we down select, we move a few elements to the fab to test a little larger scale.
20:49But scaling up takes time.
20:52And that's why this work starts long before the technology ever exists.
20:58You're looking at about five to ten years down the rule devices, yes.
21:02How are you making sure that researchers are developing the thing that people will want five, ten years into the
21:09future?
21:09That's a very good question.
21:11So success rate is not always 100%.
21:15And that's the risk we take.
21:17About 10%, 20%, 25%, what is going to make the product.
21:21My job is making sure we have enough options.
21:26That is where Intel's strategy looks different now.
21:30Instead of betting mainly on one kind of chip, the way it did 20 years ago, it's trying to cast
21:35a much wider net.
21:37Finding materials and processes for lots of different chips.
21:42So it can pivot more easily when the next big market shift happens.
21:46I think R&D's biggest challenge is going much faster speed than we ever done before.
21:53The AI is really changing the world.
21:56But suddenly it feels like to me that we got to go speed ten.
21:59And that's going to be not just the Intel founders challenge.
22:02I think that's actually everywhere's challenge in this industry.
22:06Now, the company seems to be gaining ground.
22:09Its stock has gone up more than 400% over the past year.
22:14Largely because Intel is starting to win big deals.
22:18With customers like Tesla, which announced it would use Intel's newest chip manufacturing process.
22:23Intel also struck a preliminary deal with Apple to manufacture some of its chips.
22:28And now it's partnering with NVIDIA by producing components that support the AI giant's chips.
22:34But NVIDIA still relies on Intel's biggest competitor, TSMC, to make its most advanced technology.
22:42In fact, NVIDIA recently announced plans to design its own PC chip.
22:48And have it manufactured by TSMC.
22:51A direct challenge to the market Intel has dominated for decades.
22:56What does Intel need to prove to get NVIDIA to commit more fully to Intel's boundary?
23:04We have to execute and we have to be trusted by the customer to ensure we are looking at their
23:10needs,
23:11how they want to reshape the world, and how Intel can be part of their solutions.
23:16Before any advanced chip can work, it has to be assembled with other parts.
23:21This assembly is its own highly specialized process that often needs its own plants.
23:28That's where we're about to go next.
23:31Intel has never allowed the media to visit this part of its organ plant in person.
23:36But it plays a really important role in how the company turns its chips into usable technology.
23:42So we're getting exclusive access to where Intel basically takes the chips and packages them onto a final product that
23:51ultimately goes into a device.
23:53Okay, so Olivia, this is for us to do electrostatic discharge testing for you.
23:57Tyler Osborne oversees what goes on beyond these doors.
24:01We're here to make sure that you don't accidentally shock any of our wafers.
24:04Okay, so what would happen if I shocked a wafer?
24:08Uh, electrostatic discharge can damage semiconductor devices so that they no longer properly function.
24:12Okay, so we're not shocking any wafers today.
24:16We're gonna be stepping on this.
24:17Yes.
24:18All right, then there's the little...
24:19And then you're gonna grab this handle to validate that you conduct electricity.
24:23Oh, wow.
24:24And now the door opens so you can go in.
24:25And then the door unlocks.
24:26There's like a secret code to unlock the door.
24:29But not a lot of people actually pass through these doors.
24:34So we're in robot territory.
24:36We're in robot territory.
24:38And they have a special way of announcing themselves.
24:45We hear the music.
24:47So there's robots around us.
24:48So they have right of way.
24:49Robots here have right of way.
24:51Yes.
24:52That's right.
24:53All right.
24:53That's good to know.
24:54They're smart enough to know if you're here, but it's easier if we just stay out of their space.
24:58They are carrying precious cargo.
25:01Wafers that made it through thousands of steps without a scratch.
25:06But the chips on the wafer can't work until more silicon gets stacked on top.
25:12So what we're watching here is actually the heart of the operation.
25:17This is where we take individual pieces of silicon and bond them together so that they can communicate and talk
25:22with each other to function as a single device.
25:25Now the wafer is ready to be sliced up into individual chips.
25:30So the water is there to help remove debris as we're cutting.
25:33Getting this far doesn't mean the chips will work.
25:37It just means they've made it to the moment of truth.
25:40Testing one by one.
25:42This tool is actually an acoustic microscope.
25:45And what it's doing is using the water to conduct sounds into the wafer and then actually listen to see
25:51what that sound is coming back out of the wafer to see if things are actually assembled properly.
25:58If those sounds come through right, then the chip moves to its next step.
26:03What you're seeing with flashing lights is actually cameras taking a picture almost faster than your eye can see it
26:09stop.
26:10It would look for defects perhaps happen somewhere along the way.
26:13Because no matter how much work and money goes into protecting these chips, some of them still won't make it.
26:21Those get left behind at each round of testing.
26:24This arm skips over chips that are meant for a different kind of product.
26:28Thousands and thousands of units run through each tool every single day.
26:31Every single day, all day, 24 by 7.
26:34And then whatever is put on that platform, those are perfect and they're moved on.
26:39Yes.
26:40Even if the chip looks perfect, we still don't know if it will turn on until it gets tested again.
26:49So they're actually turning the chips on right here.
26:52Yes.
26:53How do you do that?
26:54So they have microprobes inside each of these test cells that are very, very fine.
27:00Almost as fine as a human hair.
27:02They actually come down and contact the individual bumps on the chip and make electrical contact to turn it on.
27:10So that's the real test.
27:12Not just how many chips you start with, but how many actually work in the end.
27:17That's what the industry calls yield.
27:20It determines how valuable your factory is and whether customers like Nvidia or Apple trust you to make their chips.
27:29For years, yield has been TSMC's major edge over practically every other advanced chip maker.
27:36So I had to ask Naga what Intel plans to do about that.
27:41I will never be satisfied with the yield unless we are at 100%.
27:45In the past, we have been a little bit non-inclusive when it comes to inviting more of the industry
27:53partners to come teach us how to be better.
27:57And now we have opened the doors more.
28:01The chips you are seeing are built for AI laptops.
28:05But Intel says its factories can also make chips for servers and data centers.
28:10And that its new manufacturing process can build them to be faster and more power efficient than much of what
28:17the industry can make today.
28:20And if that proves to be true long term, it could be Intel's ticket back to the top.
28:27If you look over here, you can actually see several of the dye in the spool that are being put
28:32into a pocket and then covered with a cover tape and then put into that roll.
28:37So it's being wound up just like old fashioned movie projector film.
28:41So how many, I don't know, laptops could you make from that one roll?
28:46Hundreds or potentially even a few thousand.
28:49So we have a technology engine that's proven that's not only manufactured in the US, but it's actually developed and
28:57manufactured in the US.
28:59If we do our basics right, if we focus on our controllables, I'm sure the results will follow.
29:08But even as Intel grows stronger, no one company can erase how vulnerable the semiconductor supply chain really is.
29:17The entire world and the semiconductor industry requires a broad supply base than what the current industry is able to
29:26provide because the demand is very high.
29:28And if the world ever had to shift away from Taiwan fast, it still would not be simple.
29:35If, for example, TSMC were to go offline completely tomorrow, how set up is Intel's foundry to be able to
29:45handle Nvidia's designs, for example?
29:49Intel foundry is ready from the technology that we have and the supply chain that we have.
29:55And we will have to work with our customers to ensure they can put over their designs.
30:00But every one of these designs take time for it to move over to a new technology and start ramp
30:07into manufacturing.
30:08So it won't be immediate. It will take some time and work to do.
30:28So we can talk to our customers.
30:28We have to work with our customers.
30:28And we're going to be able to enable them or impact them.
30:29We'll be able to use them and have to make them like their customers.
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