Having a blast at work...

...literally. Micron Technology in Boise, ID has just started construction of a new research memory wafer fab. About five years ago they built a smaller one that was about football-field size; this one is about three times that. The earlier one was a hundred yards away or so from the building where I work; the new one will be perhaps 50 feet away.

Now, much of Idaho is part of the Columbia River Flood Basalt Plain; that is, rock, deep. Rock is a good thing to build a fab on; it makes a solid, stable foundation for the wafer fab systems. But it has to be blasted out. The new fab is going 70 feet deep, and that's a lot of blasting. They're doing it for 55 days straight, not including Sundays, at 1:30 sharp each day.

It's been going for a little more than a week now. At first we could go to the windows and watch. Then as they got closer, they put tape on the floor 15 feet from the window, and we had to be behind that 15 minutes before the blast. Now it's 50 feet from the windows, and we're told that later we'll have to move into the hallway. Also, we can't leave the building during that time. It's been very entertaining so far, but will probably turn annoying pretty soon.

Interesting.

Weren't they on the verge of being bought out by foreign investors?

JD

There was a vague rumor about China buying Micron a few months ago, but nothing ever came of it that I know. Even if it was serious, there was doubt that the US government would approve the sale. On the flip side, Micron has acquired quite a few smaller memory companies in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan; and everything left in the US, and also built new fabs in China and Singapore.

I retired in the nick of time. I worked in the affected side of that building for the past 10 years. Now I'm having a blast building rockets instead. Yeah me!

Yeah Terry, we know. We've created a shrine in your cube.

Oh wow! That is so cool.