DEC's Hudson fab 3779

At that point it wasn't clear that the facility would ever be needed. In a depressed economy and during mbuttive layoffs stockholders take a dim view of huge investments with no guarantee of payback.

Sure, but Intel has duplicated that infrastructure all over the place. OTOH, AMD is settling pretty solidly in Germany (two fabs operational and another in the pipe).

One particle of dust (foreign matter) per cubic meter of air.

The diameter of the silicon disk that is manufactured and the chips are cut from.

The chips might be the size of your thumbnail but the tools needed to make them are the size of a house. IIRC, one of the issues was the columnation of the light needed to expose the wafers. The "camera" for 300mm wafers is bigger than that needed for 200mm wafers. Many fabs were built before 300mm wafers were a twinkle in the process engineer's eye.

I'd think generating one's own would be too expensive, except in emergency. The Burlington fab did bring in turbine backup generators for Y2K. There were a dozen or so turbines mounted in trucks lined up along the entrance.

Yes, we're on the same page (didn't know there was a Hudson NH).

-- Keith