Intel has started to investigate the causes of the explosion which occurred earlier this week at the company's Fab 22 chip manufacturing facility, located just outside of Phoenix, Arizona, and sent four people to the hospital.
The explosion occurred in one of the facility's solvent waste treatment rooms, where the company processes chemicals that are used in the production of semiconductos before these substances are sent to specialized disposal facilities.The list of chemicals involved in this process includes caustics such as hydrochloric and sulfuric acids, hydrogen peroxide, ammonium hydroxide and a few others.Intel believes that the workers involved in the incident were just starting the solvent treating process when the explosion occurred.“We are trying to ascertain what happened,” said Josh Walden, Intel's vice president and general manager for fab sort manufacturing, in a statement for the Phoenix Business Journal.“All we know is that there was no damage or release of chemicals to the community,” continued the company's rep.All the fire suppression systems that are installed at the factory worked just as they were supposed to, and limited the damage.After the explosion, the building (including the nearby Fab 32) was evacuated as a precautionary measure, and manufacturing was resumed about 90-minutes after the explosion occurred.“They’re all back in to the production facility and there was no disruption to the process,” said Mr. Walden.Fab 22 is one of Intel's less known fabrication facilities as reports suggest it manufactures chips based on the 130nm process using 200mm wafers.On the other hand, the nearby Fab 32 is an important 32nm facility and the company plans to update it to build chips using the 22nm Tri-Gate production node.
