Intel has been on a successful run when it comes to expanding and growing its operations. Today, Intel inaugurated its latest expansion of its Oregon plant called D1X, and announced a new name for it – now known as Gordon Moore Park. The investment cost more than $3 billion and has been in development for the past three years.
The expansion project, also known as Mod3, adds a massive 270,000 square feet of clean room to allow Intel to develop different technologies at various stages of development. The extra space allows for faster development, so it should help with some of the roadmap delays we’ve seen from Intel over the years. For some context, this area is larger than four American football fields combined, all in one clean room.
While this expansion project has been in the works for a few years, the opening of new factories is fully in line with Intel’s IDM 2.0 strategy announced last year. After Pat Gelsinger took over as CEO, Intel announced that it would switch from building its own chips, but also manufacturing them to other companies, while also allowing others to make some of their own designs. Besides, the company wishes to increase its production and development capabilities significantly. We’ve seen Intel announce a new plant in Ohio, which will represent an investment of at least $20 billion, and another $36 billion being invested in multiple plants across Europe.
Among the many innovations Intel is working on, the company highlights RibbonFET, a new transistor architecture – and the first in more than a decade – as well as the industry’s first use of High-NA EUV lithography. All of this led to what Intel called the angstroms era. Angstrom is a tenth of a nanometer, and that’s how the processor will be measured in the next few years. The latest Intel processors are still based on the Intel 7, which is the latest 10nm architecture. Intel 4 comes next, and processors will continue to shrink. Such factories are intended to help speed up this process.
If you’re wondering why the Oregon plant is now called Gordon Moore Park, it’s named after the Intel co-founder who predicted that the number of transistors that could fit on a microchip would nearly double every year. Today this prediction is known as Moore’s Law, and the purpose of this Oregon plant is precisely to continue to lead this prediction.
The newly renamed Gordon Moore Park is the core of Intel’s technology development, where new architectures, processes and packaging technologies are developed. It now covers an area of about 500 acres and employs about 10,000 people.
source: Intel Corporation
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