Hello, welcome to Intel Ireland. This is our Semiconductor manufacturing plant where we make the silicon chips that drive the electronic revolution.
The manufacture of silicon chips is a very complicated process. It involves building millions of transistors on a little square piece of silicon called a die . This die is so small that you can easily hold it on the end of your fingertip.
When we have finished building and connecting all the transistors together we get our silicon chips. The chips we make are used as microprocessors, these are special chips and are the brains inside the computer. We also make memory chips that are used by computers to store memory.
Silicon is an element like oxygen or copper and is found in rocks and sand. We use silicon because it is a semiconductor and is ideal for building transistors. The silicon is extracted from sand and is then purified into ingots . The ingots are sliced into thin circular wafers which are 8" in diameter, are dark grey in colour and have a shiny appearance. We carefully clean and check the wafers before they begin their journey through our factory which will convert them into silicon chips. Because we use wafers as our starting product we call our factory a wafer fabrication plant or Fab for short.
Before we begin our journey through the Fab we must first put on a special 'space-age' suit. This is because the Fab is so clean and we don't want to introduce any contamination or dirt. In fact we refer to this part of the Fab as a clean room. Our clean room is a thousand times cleaner than a hospital operating theatre. We need this very clean environment because the transistors we are building on the silicon are 500 times smaller than the width of a human hair. Any spec of dust or dirt falling on the wafers would ruin the microchips. The clean room is divided into different areas known as Functional Areas: We begin our journey in the Diffusion area. Ann will tell us what happens in this area.
