Intel's Mark Bohr stands inside the heart of his company's Ronler Acres chip development and manufacturing campus.Ben Fox Rubin/CNET
HILLSBORO, Ore. -- Mark Bohr peers through the yellow-tinted windows outside D1D, one of Intel's secretive computer chip factories housed at its 300-acre campus here, about a 30-minute drive west from Portland.
Dozens of upside-down U-shaped robots zip along the ceiling. Here and there, technicians wearing full-body clean-room outfits -- more or less, hazmat suits without the gas mask -- roam the factory floor. Rows of boxy, chipmaking machines fill a space the size of four and a half football fields.
The factory is just one of four chipmaking facilities at Ronler Acres, Intel's largest center for semiconductor research and manufacturing. Each of those buildings is jammed with chipmaking machines that cost anywhere from $3 million to more than $30 million each. Intel says it's spent more than $25 billion in capital investments at its six different sites in Oregon since buying its first property in the state in 1974.
"Building the brick and steel is the cheap part," Bohr, a soft-spoken Chicago native with round silver-frame glasses and straight gray hair parted to the left, tells me while motioning toward the pricey equipment. "You have to continually invent new materials and new structures."
Bohr, who heads a team of Intel scientists tasked with inventing tomorrow's computer chips, is just one of the thousands of people in the chipmaking industry working to push forward Moore's Law. That's the idea that chips double in complexity about every two years as chip components shrink and become more tightly packed, enabling the creation of faster, cheaper and less power-hungry gadgets.
Moore's Law, which was conceived by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965 and turns 50 on Sunday, remains one of the most accurate predictors of future technology. It's set the breakneck pace that all electronics moves along today, goading chip companies to make sure they can keep up. Semiconductor makers are sinking billions of dollars into research and manufacturing each year just to stay in the race. In 1966, a new chip plant cost $14 million. In 1995, the price tag was $1.5 billion. Today, it can cost as much as $10 billion -- roughly the annual gross domestic product of Mongolia.
"It is relentless," Bohr says, with a laugh, about keeping up with Moore's Law. "There's pressure. I know I can't relax and my team can't relax."
Speed of innovation matters to the tech industry. Each generation of less-expensive, more-intricate chips brought on inventions including the Internet and smartphones, lowered the cost of computers, and pushed electronics into new industries. The chips developed decades ago drove mainframe, mini and then personal computers. Going forward, they'll be used to run everything from self-driving cars to smart homes to virtual-reality gear -- as well as countless other innovations that will drastically change the way people live and communicate.
To keep its title as the world's biggest chipmaker, Intel spent $11.5 billion, 22 percent of its sales, in research and development last year. That's twice as much total spending as the next-ranked chipmaker, Qualcomm, according to IC Insights.
In the semiconductor industry, you need to spend to thrive. Dozens of chip companies over the decades have fallen by the wayside, leaving just four players building the most-advanced chips: Intel, Samsung, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) and GlobalFoundries.
