Company
ActiveIntel
Santa Clara · Since 1968
Still independent, and still a manufacturer of the processors other companies design computers around.
Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore founded Intel in 1968, with Andrew Grove soon running the operation. The plan was to make semiconductor memory. The product that changed the payroll of other companies was the microprocessor, the 4004 in 1971 and then the chips that became the required part in a personal computer.
Intel did not make the computer on the desk. It made the component every compatible computer had to buy. That is a different kind of employer: a factory of extraordinary precision, and a standard other firms design around.
The fab and the architecture
A fabrication plant employs technicians who work in cleanrooms, process engineers who chase a yield, and designers who sit far from the line. The jobs are specialized because a single speck of dust ruins a wafer and a single mistake in a design ruins a generation of software. Grove's management writing, especially the habit of arguing openly about bad news, became as famous as the chips. The fame was a style. The employment was the cleanroom.
Still making the part
Intel remains independent. It missed the chips that power phones, and it is spending heavily to manufacture again at the leading edge after years of slipping behind. The company is not a projection. Later chapters that imagine new computing hardware are. Intel's page is about the firm that, from 1968, made the processor a purchased part rather than a circuit a computer company built for itself.
The work it organized
- Process engineer
- Cleanroom technician
- Chip designer
- Yield analyst