KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 20 — It’s the primary time I’ve been to Penang since I used to be a baby in all probability. Having grown up in Ipoh, I seldom discovered the time or want to go up north; it’s not just like the meals there may be higher than Ipoh anyway.
However, it’s late August and I someway ended up right here on the island just some weeks earlier than Intel would go on to totally debut their new Meteor Lake structure to the world. Nicely truly, I do understand how I ended up right here; Intel was about to present me and quite a lot of different media folks from all around the world a tour of their services in Penang and close by Kulim, Kedah.
Promoting
Promoting
Humble beginnings
Intel has a storied historical past in Malaysia. The corporate first set foot in Malaysia over 5 a long time in the past in 1972, after they invested US$1.6 million to construct the A1 plant, their first meeting plant in Penang in addition to their first ever worldwide manufacturing facility. It was constructed on high of what was only a muddy paddy subject earlier than that, and famously was additionally the place the automobile of Intel’s then vp Keith Thomson and future Intel CEO Andy Grove would get caught after visiting the Penang plant throughout the monsoon season.
That first A1 Intel Malaysia web site now not exists. On 1 Could 1975, a hearth broke out within the three-year-old campus, with the suspect being a defective gentle. It will solely be an hour earlier than the manufacturing unit utterly burned right down to the bottom, with solely the cafeteria left standing. There have been fortunately no accidents reported as A1 was closed that day, however the fireplace would trigger US$2.5 million in harm and it wouldn’t be until 1976 that manufacturing resumed at Penang.
Fifty-one years later although, I now stand in Intel Malaysia’s Penang campus, with the pink (or slightly, blue) carpets rolled out for us. There’s no facade of grandeur right here although; each one among us on this tour of Intel’s services needed to hand over our telephones, laptops, cameras and so forth — we weren’t even allowed a pen and paper as we walked the manufacturing unit flooring. Such is the secrecy wanted to make sure Intel’s manufacturing strains maintain working and that confidential info keep categorised.
Intel Malaysia’s double responsibility (and extra)
Intel Malaysia began off as an meeting plant, which was very a lot seen as a win-win state of affairs throughout the 70s, with Intel searching for decrease prices whereas the Malaysian authorities was eager for a serious title like Intel to rock up and create jobs right here.
As of late although, issues have modified fairly drastically. Intel Malaysia nonetheless isn’t fairly the place you’ll discover Intel’s semiconductor wafers being fabbed, however their campuses right here play an important position in Intel’s world manufacturing community — a marked shift from the unique A1 plant that initially assembled simply the 1103 DRAM built-in circuit. It has wafer fabs all around the globe that create these shiny round disks you’re in all probability aware of, which then get despatched to Intel’s Malaysia campuses, each in Kulim and in Penang.
The wafers will first arrive on the Kulim campus, the place the Kulim Die Kind and Die Preparation (KMDSDP) in situated. Right here, we walked into the manufacturing unit flooring with laboratory coats and hair nets on us to discover a place that was lined on this yellowish sepia lighting. There’s a purpose for this in fact, with the yellow lighting essential to keep away from the Mylar polyester sheet that holds these round wafers in place from degrading.
The wafers are positioned onto these Mylar sheets, and inserted right into a machine that first etches out the precise dies themselves. They then get transported to a different machine, which has highly effective, watercooled noticed blades slicing up the round wafer disk into a number of little rectangles. A curious little robotic arm then picks up every little die off the Mylar sheet and arranges all of them onto a tape reel, nearly like how a movie roll is packed.
That’s simply all of the die preparation. The following stage on the Kulim facility is die sorting, the place you’ll discover enormous machines stacked in rows, every housing 20 check cells that check every chip for defects, guaranteeing they’re as much as spec. The die sorting facet of the Kulim facility was additionally the place we stumbled upon these curious little blue robots. They’re automated guided automobiles that accumulate a stack of dies from storage and mechanically sends them over to the testing machines. Every of them play this little musical jingle, which lets the people round know after they’re approaching. Attempt to block their manner although and so they’ll cease in its path, stopping any catastrophic accidents from taking place.
As soon as all that’s finished, the processed dies get despatched throughout the Penang Straight to Intel’s Penang Meeting and Check (PGAT) facility for additional processing. Right here, the dies are certain to the teal-coloured PCBs that you simply’ll see on the perimeters of your desktop processor, with some epoxy positioned between them to make sure stress is uniformly distributed throughout the die. They then place just a little little bit of thermal interface materials over the die, earlier than an built-in warmth spreader is positioned over it; that is often just for their desktop and server processors as cellular processors don’t include an IHS over the die.
These chips are mainly finished now, however nonetheless require a good bit of testing earlier than it could actually truly be packaged and bought to the patron. The completed CPU will get loaded onto trays for a burn-in check, which stresses the chips at each excessive temperatures and excessive voltages in a bid to flush out the unhealthy chips. Those who make it previous the burn-in stage then get one other spherical of checks, checking every chip’s electrical traces and performance to make sure they work as supposed, with a closing platform efficiency verification stage which locations these recent processors into machines just like those you and I must mimic actual world circumstances.
And lastly, Intel Malaysia can be host to their very own System Integration and Manufacturing Companies (SIMS) facility. Attributable to how vertically built-in Intel is, the corporate must make some very, very specialised gear for itself; it’s not like you may simply go onto Shopee and search for a Excessive Density Burn-In Tester machine that permits you to do burn-in testing on still-unreleased processors. SIMS may be very a lot a one-of-a-kind manufacturing unit. Reasonably than being immediately concerned in making Intel’s processors, it as an alternative makes the type of testing gear corresponding to specialist motherboards and machines wanted to validate all of the chips that come out of not simply Intel Malaysia, however all of their services around the globe.
A number of the key gear that they manufacture themselves on the SIMS facility embody the Excessive Density Burn-In Tester that lets Intel carry out burn-in testing, a Excessive Density Modular Tester that lets them carry out class and backend testing on their CPUs in addition to System Stage Testers used to validate the performance of Intel merchandise in actual world environments.
And that gained’t be all both. In late 2021, Intel introduced a RM30 billion funding into their Malaysia web site. Referred to as the Pelican Mission, that is set to be a brand new superior packaging facility, and is about to enter operation a while subsequent 12 months and might be the place among the Meteor Lake cellular processors might be produced. One other meeting check web site referred to as Falcon is at the moment being constructed on the Kulim campus too. It’s all a part of Intel’s plan to get again to the highest with their oft-repeated objective of 5 nodes in 4 years.
Individuals right here appear to genuinely love their jobs
One factor that I really couldn’t get off of my head although is that, throughout my couple of days strolling by means of Intel Malaysia’s services, just about each single Intel worker we spoke to liked their job. In fact, it could make sense that Intel would maybe cherry decide their most enthusiastic members of employees to speak to us, nevertheless it actually did appear real even after we went off matter at occasions.
Each time we requested members of employees how lengthy that they had been at Intel Malaysia, it was oftentimes over a decade with the shortest tenure we encountered being 4 years, a fresh-faced assistant to a veteran technician who had been there for practically twenty years. There have been loads of workers right here with light badges too, an indication that they’ve been 12 months for lengthy. One engineer even talked about that he had spent over three a long time working there, bar a few years within the center when he left Intel, solely to rejoin the corporate just a few years later.
There have been additionally loads of ladies among the many employees there, with Intel claiming 40% of their 15,000 workforce being ladies. Maybe it begins from the highest, with AK Chong at the moment Intel Malaysia’s managing director and the primary lady to carry that place. She herself had been with Intel Malaysia for many years, having joined the corporate again in 1991, holding quite a lot of completely different technical management roles earlier than rising up the ranks.
Malaysia may be very a lot a sentimental location for Intel too, with speak about how Malaysia particularly is a serious web site for Intel attributable to it being the situation of their first worldwide web site, and so they even declare that 98% of all workers at Intel Malaysia are Malaysian. They spend about USD330 million per 12 months on native suppliers, and are on path to having invested about USD14 billion into the Malaysian financial system by the point 2032 rolls round. Intel Malaysia wasn’t shy in speaking about their efforts to present again to the group both, highlighting a number of applications that they run right here such because the Intel Geek Children initiative that goes round colleges nationwide to have science workshops for underserved main faculty children.
From that tiny A1 plant in the midst of a paddy subject, to a mega web site encompassing 7 million sqft, 16 buildings and over 2 million sqft of producing area, Intel Malaysia has grown in all probability past what Andy Grove might’ve ever imagined all these years in the past when his automobile received caught within the Penang mud. — SoyaCincau
