This week Apple announced an acceleration of its US manufacturing efforts, including some Mac mini production coming stateside. Now today via The Wall Street Journal, the company has offered a behind-the-scenes look at its US chipmaking process.
WSJ took tour of Apple chipmaking partner facilities in US
Earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal broke news of Mac mini production 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 chip supply chain in the U.S.”
The full article offers in-depth details on the various processes involved in Apple’s chip production in the US, including visits to:
- GlobalWafers America‘s new Sherman, TX facility
- TSMC’s chipmaking foundry in Arizona
- Foxconn’s 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 step-by-step details on the chipmaking process. For example, Winkler describes the new GlobalWafers facility:
The start of the supply chain is GlobalWafers America, in Sherman, Texas. It takes purified silicon rocks, a good source of which is sand in North Carolina, and fashions them into the 12-inch wafers that will later be imprinted with trillions of transistors to become chips.
The rocks are melted down at 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit to form perfect silicon “crystals” inside a 35-foot-tall machine called a crystal puller. The machines essentially grow silicon crystals into cylindrical ingots that weigh hundreds of pounds.
The ingots are cut into wafers with a wire saw, which move through multiple machines to be polished, tested and boxed up so they can be sent to the next stage of the supply chain.
Another interesting tidbit involved the number of visible employees on site:
I didn’t see a lot of workers in these facilities. Chip-making is highly automated. The U.S. isn’t trying to reshore the industry because it will drive mass employment. It is doing so to address a strategic vulnerability, and that requires operating competitively.
For more on that note, see the recent NYT piece about Tim Cook’s CIA briefing about Taiwan.
If you’re interested in Apple’s US-based chipmaking efforts, I highly recommend reading Winkler’s story.
What takeaways do you have from the behind-the-scenes look at Apple’s US chip operations? Let us know in the comments.
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