As noted Bloomberg and Reuters, at the end of this work week, Intel management personally attended the launch ceremony of a production line in Ireland, the construction of which cost the company $18.5 billion. Here, for the first time in Intel history, components using Intel 4 technology using ultra-hard ultraviolet radiation will be mass-produced. In fact, this is the same “classic” 7-nm process technology, the implementation of which has been postponed many times. Meteor Lake processors, which will hit the market in December, will be produced using the Intel 4 process technology.
Image source: Bloomberg
Intel representatives figuratively described the accuracy of the lithographic scanners used in the production of chips using Intel 4 technology as follows: they would allow a laser pointer to hit a person’s thumb if he were on Earth, and the equipment with this pointer was located on the Moon.
Currently, the Fab 34 facility in Leixlip, Ireland, where chips using Intel 4 technology will be produced, has seven corresponding ASML EUV scanners installed. Each of them is comparable in size to a bus and costs approximately $150 million. Robots move silicon wafers between scanners on suspended guides, thus covering up to 22 km in total. By the end of the year, Intel will receive from ASML the first copy of the world’s most advanced lithographic scanner, which will have a high numerical aperture and also work with EUV radiation. Previously, it was believed that such equipment would be necessary for the production of chips using Intel 18A technology, but now it has become known that such use will only be experimental, and such Intel systems will be needed on a mass scale only as part of more advanced technical processes.
Describing his two and a half years as CEO of Intel, Patrick Gelsinger said in an interview with Bloomberg that the company “scored a passing grade.” According to him, the conditional “machine for producing products” he created, although it is not world-class, is now at least not broken.
