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The Hudson Fab was a
semiconductor fabrication Semiconductor device fabrication is the process used to manufacture semiconductor devices, typically integrated circuits (ICs) such as microprocessors, microcontrollers, and memories (such as RAM and flash memory). It is a multiple-step photol ...
factory in
Hudson, Massachusetts Hudson is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, with a total population of 20,092 as of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. Before its incorporation as a town in 1866, Hudson was a ne ...
, 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 until ...
(DEC). For many years it produced some of the most complex
integrated circuit An integrated circuit (IC), also known as a microchip or simply chip, is a set of electronic circuits, consisting of various electronic components (such as transistors, resistors, and capacitors) and their interconnections. These components a ...
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, shipped in 1984. The series uses processors that implement the VAX instruction se ...
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, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...
over the
Intel Itanium Itanium (; ) is a discontinued family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture (formerly called IA-64). The Itanium architecture originated at Hewlett-Packard (HP), and was later jointly developed by HP and I ...
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 computers ( ...
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 Robert Allen Palmer (19 January 1949 – 26 September 2003) was an English singer and songwriter. He was known for his powerful and soulful voice, sartorial elegance and stylistic explorations, combining soul, funk, jazz, rock, pop, regga ...
, completed in 1998 with the sale of the core of the company to
Compaq Compaq Computer Corporation was an American information technology, information technology company founded in 1982 that developed, sold, and supported computers and related products and services. Compaq produced some of the first IBM PC compati ...
. 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

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Further reading


The Lost Engineering Paradise of DEC
Manufacturing plants in the United States Digital Equipment Corporation {{comp-stub