This week, Apple announced an acceleration of its manufacturing efforts in the US, including making some Mac minis stateside. Now today over The Wall Street Journalthe company offered a behind-the-scenes look at its US chip manufacturing process.
The WSJ went on a tour of Apple’s chip manufacturing partner facilities in the US
Earlier this week The Wall Street Journal brought news of a production Mac mini coming to the US later this year.
Now the same journalist, Rolfe Winkler, has followed up with a new article about how “Apple took me on a tour of partner facilities to see the rebirth of the US chip supply chain”
The full article offers in-depth details on the various processes involved in Apple’s US chip manufacturing, including visits to:
- New GlobalWafers America facility Sherman, TX
- TSMC chip foundry in Arizona
- Foxconn facility in Houston, TX for final assembly
You can read it here with a WSJ subscription or access it via Apple News+ here.
There are extensive photos and detailed details of the chip manufacturing process. For example, Winkler describes the new GlobalWafers device:
The start of the supply chain is GlobalWafers America in Sherman, Texas. He takes cleaned silicon rocks, a good source of which is sand in North Carolina, and shapes them into 12-inch wafers that will later be printed with trillions of transistors to become chips.
The rocks are melted at 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit to form perfect silicon “crystals” inside a 35-foot-tall machine called a crystal extractor. The machines essentially grow silicon crystals into cylindrical ingots that weigh hundreds of pounds.
The ingots are cut into slices using a wire saw that pass through several machines to be polished, tested and boxed to be sent to the next stage of the supply chain.
Another interesting tidbit related to the number of visible employees on site:
I didn’t see many workers in these establishments. Chip production is highly automated. The US is not trying to revive industry because it will lead to mass employment. It does this to deal with a strategic vulnerability, and that requires competitive functioning.
More on this note can be found in the recent RIVET piece on Tim Cook’s CIA briefing on Taiwan.
If you’re interested in Apple’s efforts to make chips in the US, I highly recommend reading Winkler’s story.
What insights do you have behind the scenes of Apple’s chip operations in the US? Let us know in the comments.
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