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“Two of those three still exist in abun-
The BIG Boom! (from 12) dance in Santa Clara county (you guess
which ones).” A modest fixer-upper near
base, they also added undesirable chem- Intel’s Santa Clara headquarter’s today
icals to the local groundwater aquifers. would set you back a bare minimum of
$400,000 to $500,000.
From the 1960s to the 1980, the EPA
notes, these sites used solvents, primar- What’s under the soil
ily trichloro ethene (TCE), which were The journal added, “But it’s not housing
released to the sub-surface during opera- costs that drove the fabs away. It’s what’s
tions, handling and from tank leaks. under the soil, as in tectonic plates.”
Paying millions
Intel and others who maintained fabs in
Silicon Valley — including the now-fabless
AMD, are still paying millions to clean-up
the acquifers on their former sites, a pro-
cess that will continue for decades.
The EPA has divided Superfund sites by
location. The area referred to as MEW
(Mountain View, Ellis St. and Whisman Av-
enue) contains sites formerly used by Fair-
child Semiconductor, Intel and Raytheon.
Samsung recently announced it will construct a new fab at its
Superfund sites throughout the U.S. existing Austin, Texas location. (Samsung)
“Groundwater treatment and monitoring
are ongoing and vapor intrusion monitor- The environment
ing and mitigation continue,” the EPA re- “As semiconductor technology became
ports. more advanced the fabs and foundries
became exquisitely sensitive to dust, con-
California, however, is not alone in hav- tamination, and vibration.
ing Superfund sites. Throughout the U.S.,
there are 1,303 sites scattered among the “The merest disruption could ruin a week’s
50 states. worth of chip production, consigning sev-
eral millions of dollars of silicon to the
The largest Superfund site is not in Sili- dumpster. That’s exactly the kind of plant
con Valley — it’s in Butte, Montana at the you don’t want to build over an earth-
Berkeley Pit, a former open-pit copper quake fault.”
mine.
Memory makers
California, in fact, is just second in EPA Of the top chip makers in IC Insights’ an-
sites with 97, following first place New Jer- nual listing, after memory maven Sam-
sey, which has 113. In 2009, Embedded sung, numbers 3 and 4 (excluding TSMC),
Technology Journal noted Silicon Valley’s are suppliers of memory: They are SK
early inducements were “the happy con- hynix and Micron Technology, in that order.
fluence of universities, talent, and cheap
land. next page
