Intel Ireland last week chalked up a milestone in its $7 billion Fab 34 construction project: A team rolled in the new plant's first huge chipmaking tool. The machine, a lithography resist track, arrived by truck at Intel's Leixlip, Ireland, plant after a flight across the Atlantic Ocean from an Intel Oregon plant.

Ireland's new lithography tool runs in conjunction with an extreme ultraviolet (EUV) scanner, a crown jewel in Intel's manufacturing capability. The new tool provides precision coating of silicon wafers before alignment and exposure inside the EUV scanner. The wafer then returns to the lithography tool for a series of precision oven bakes, photo development and rinsing. A typical Intel fab contains about 1,200 advanced tools, many of them costing millions of dollars a piece.