Rupert Goodwins' Diary - Holy Land Special

The graph was indeed denuded of real data. But on the wall outside the meeting room, there was a sea of awards that Fab 18 had won over the years from Intel HQ. One of these awards had caught my eye as we were waiting to go in:

"Portland Technology Development Partnership Award" it read. "Presented to FAB 18 in recognition of your leadership in ramping P858 technology". Beneath those words was engraved a graph — P858 Yield Performance — and this time, those axes were labelled. I nudged a German journalist standing next to me and his face lit up. The game was on.

It's not much. P858 is six years old, and the graph numbers — each level was labelled ISO and three digits — are meaningless without much more explanation than we'd ever get. But it did mean we got to hear the sweetest six words in a journalist's experience, when one of our number asked the fab manager "What are the yield figures in ISO terms?", the manager looked horrified and said "How come you know about that?"

Maxine Fassberg, Intel VP Tech and Manufacturing and woman in charge of the new fab, contemplates a suspiciously well-informed journalist

Photography was very banned, of course, so I couldn't get a picture of the treacherous award. However, one of our number did accidentally press the wrong button on his cameraphone and got a frustratingly fuzzy but pleasingly evidential picture, which I am delighted to pass on.

Hastily shot but still a smoking gun

The rest of the fab tour was glorious fun. We saw lots of people in bunny suits working on wafers, and enough mysterious lab equipment stacked from floor to ceiling to equip any ten James Bond sets. The air of science-fiction mystery was much aided by most of the signage being in Hebrew, which to an untutored eye might as well be Martian. At one point, most of the journalists and guides went into the gown room and put on the first stage of the clean room clothing — cap, galoshes, underjacket, gloves, thing that goes over your beard if you have one — which did nothing to dispel the sense of being off-planet.

There's so much more than I've got room for here. Fab 8, for example, which has produced parts that are in 25 percent of all cars worldwide and which should become Intel's first micro-electromechanical (MEMS) factory — real nanotech. The guided tour of Jerusalem after dark, where we seemed to be the only people in the city — and started to lose people, one by one, in the dark back streets, to the occasional sound of distant gunfire. The visit to the Western Wall, where you could go up and leave a message to God but you had to put on a skullcap first: I mentioned the coincidence between this and the gowning room to my Intel minder, but he merely looked at me as if I was losing my mind. He may not have been so wrong: Jerusalem Syndrome is always a possibility.

This and much more will have to wait for another occasion. If you like weird, you must go to Israel: it's much, much stranger than anywhere else I've been to.

Friday 16/12/2005

It was an anticlimax coming back to Heathrow and a London packing up for Christmas, even though the flight skirted around some of the most spectacular thunderstorms as it went past Egypt. There's no time to tell you about the Intel PR who got pulled going through Ben Gurion Airport security on the way back to the UK, because his laptop had something about it which upset a robotic sniffer, or the Intel test wireless network in some closed-off lab which leaked through to the briefing room and which... well, put it this way, people really ought to change the default passport on their wireless routers. A chap with Netstumbler and Nmap on his laptop could really go places, at least until the word 'Mossad' comes unbidden to his mind. Likewise, the kosher sushi bar can get only the briefest mention.

I must go back. Next year in Jerusalem!