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Intel is trucking a 916,000-pound 'Super Load' across Ohio to its new fab, spawning road closures over nine days (www.tomshardware.com)

submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Intel's 916,000-pound shipment is a "cold box," a self-standing air-processor structure that facilitates the cryogenic technology needed to fabricate semiconductors. The box is 23 feet tall, 20 feet wide, and 280 feet long, nearly the length of a football field. The immense scale of the cold box necessitates a transit process that moves at a "parade pace" of 5-10 miles per hour. Intel is taking over southern Ohio's roads for the next several weeks and months as it builds its new Ohio One Campus, a $28 billion project to create a 1,000-acre campus with two chip factories and room for more. Calling it the new "Silicon Heartland," the project will be the first leading-edge semiconductor fab in the American Midwest, and once operational, will get to work on the "Angstrom era" of Intel processes, 20A and beyond.

I don't know why, but I've never thought of the transport logistics involved in building a semiconductor fabrication plant.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Isn't Angstrom 10^-10 meters? And nanometers 10^-9 meters? So 20A (assuming A = Angstrom) is just 2nm?

Are they trying to say that by moving to this new era, they'll go single digit Angstrom i.e., 0.x nm?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Yes, but that is long past an actuall transistor size and just a marketing term.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (2 children)

So what is the actual transistor size then? And why use an SI unit then anyway? Why not use femto-bananas then when it does not reflect the real size?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Smallest features are around 13nm due to EUV wavelength. I think people incorporated hacks to etch smaller stuff but not much smaller.

I think it is similar stuff as with Moore's "law" that is not an actuall law only a trend or myth.

In the 70' 80' 90' that number represented an actuall size and it stuck into 00' 10' and 20'

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

There's also an argument out there that companies should stop talking about feature sizes (that are fudged for marketing all the time, anyway) and instead talk about density of components.

Also, if you think Moore's Law is about density of components, then the industry has kept up. However, that's not actually what Moore claimed way back when: https://wumpus-cave.net/post/2024/03/2024-03-20-moores-law-is-dead/index.html

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Angstrom was invented in physics because they needed a length unit that was smaller than SI prefixes would allow. The industry only picked it up once they got to a certain level.

(Contrary to what a lot of people think, physicists do not strictly follow SI. They bypass it for reasons of convenience all the time.)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

It's kind of like needing the proper units for the scale you need to work at.