The Hudson Fab was a

semiconductor fabrication Semiconductor device fabrication is the process used to manufacture semiconductor devices, typically integrated circuit (IC) chips such as modern computer processors, microcontrollers, and memory chips such as NAND flash and DRAM that are p ...

factory in

Hudson, Massachusetts Hudson is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, with a total population of 20,092 as of the 2020 census. Before its incorporation as a town in 1866, Hudson was a neighborhood and unincorporated village of Marlborough, Massa ...

, opened in 1979 by

Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president unt ...

(DEC). For many years it produced some of the most complex

integrated circuit An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit (also referred to as an IC, a chip, or a microchip) is a set of electronic circuits on one small flat piece (or "chip") of semiconductor material, usually silicon. Large numbers of tiny ...

s in the world, as part of the

microVAX The MicroVAX is a discontinued family of low-cost minicomputers developed and manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). The first model, the MicroVAX I, was introduced in 1983.(announced October 1983) They used processors that implemen ...

and related product lines. It underwent a major upgrade in 1994, but DEC's fortunes were already in decline by this point. In 1997, DEC launched a lawsuit against

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

over the

Intel Itanium Itanium ( ) is a discontinued family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture (formerly called IA-64). Launched in June 2001, Intel marketed the processors for enterprise servers and high-performance comput ...

design, which DEC claimed violated a number of their patents related to HyperThreading. The outcome was that Intel purchased the plant and rights to the DEC's current

DEC Alpha Alpha (original name Alpha AXP) is a 64-bit reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Alpha was designed to replace 32-bit VAX complex instruction set compute ...

and

StrongARM The StrongARM is a family of computer microprocessors developed by Digital Equipment Corporation and manufactured in the late 1990s which implemented the ARM v4 instruction set architecture. It was later acquired by Intel in 1997 from DEC's o ...

designs for $700 million in October 1997. This was part of a wider breakup of DEC being carried out by DEC CEO Robert Palmer, completed in 1998 with the sale of the core of the company to

Compaq Compaq Computer Corporation (sometimes abbreviated to CQ prior to a 2007 rebranding) was an American information technology company founded in 1982 that developed, sold, and supported computers and related products and services. Compaq produced ...

. Intel operated the factory as Intel Fab 17. They upgraded from 250 to 180 nm in 1999 as part of their Copy Exactly program to keep all of their fabs using identical equipment and allow them to shift production around their factories. It shifted to 130 nm at some later date. The plant was increasingly used to produce runs of specialty products that could use these older methods. It closed in 2014 as the site did not have enough room to be rebuilt to use modern systems.

References

* * * *

References

Further reading