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Seventy miles north of New York City, in the heart of the Hudson Valley, lies IBM's vast East Fishkill site.
Opened in 1963, the site has grown to encompass 46 buildings over 885 acres, which IBM now shares with nine other companies. Up to 6,000 IBMers work here, 1,000 of them in the site's 300mm chip fab, which opened in 2002.
The site works "to provide the server team, both z and p, early access to technology, and to work together to customise that technology," fab operations director John Arthur says. The fab also produces chips for companies such as Cisco, Microsoft, ST Ericsson, Qualcomm and Samsung, and has a sideline in producing silicon for games consoles: the chips for the Nintendo Wii U system are made here, for example.
To enter the fab floor, employees have to pass through a clean room, where they put on hair nets, latex gloves and body suits - only their eyes are left exposed. No photos are permitted inside the $6bn facility, so all pictures here are provided by IBM.
The big blue (no pun intended) machines above are stockers, which hold the wafers until they're ready to move along the line and be processed.
Above, IBM employee Mary Westermann inspects one of the fab's 300mm silicon wafers.
The East Fishkill fab turns out the company's 32nm Power7 chips. Such is their complexity, they require 1,200 separate steps to make, and have a yield of around 50-60 percent, according to Arthur. "The size and complexity of the chip generally dictates the yield," he explains. "A smaller chip with less function will yield higher, a more complex chip with more function will generally yield less. Some of our OEM chips have yields that are in the 90s."
Arthur is heading up the project to build the next generation of Power chips, Power8, which are still in the very early stages of design. "The chip designers use mainframes to design these things. We're building chips so we can make the machines so we can design the next generation of chips," he says.