Busy season at IBM Bromont

It's the busy season at IBM's outpost in Bromont, Quebec. Between September and Christmas, the semiconductor plant will prepare millions of chips no bigger than your thumbnail, many of them destined for the holy trinity of video game consoles: Sony's PlayStation 3, Microsoft's Xbox 360 and the Nintendo Wii. You wouldn't know it, though. The place is immaculate-more like a new hospital ward than a 37-year-old industrial complex-and feels almost devoid of people. In fact, several hundred technicians and engineers work here around the clock (though with 800,000 square feet to play with, they're pretty spread out). As the only plant to prepare chips for all three console makers,

the people here play a pivotal role in ensuring the technology you use works the way it's supposed to.

Each day, truckloads of circular "wafers," the raw material of microprocessors, arrive at the Eastern Townships hamlet of Bromont from IBM's factory in Fishkill, New York. Once in the hands of a technician, individual wafers-measuring 30 centimetres across-are etched with a laser and sliced with a diamond-coated saw into as many as 4,000 chips. The cutting surface between the chips is barely the width of a human hair, so it takes highly skilled operators-like the ones at this Quebec plant-to pull it off. The chip is then soldered to a carrier platform-equipped with up to 10,000 minuscule silver joints-and fitted with a "lid" designed to siphon away heat (some of the densest chips contain billions of transistors and can run five to 10 times hotter than a household iron). Next, it's on to testing, where the chips are zapped with electrical currents and heated to temperatures in excess of 100 C to ensure they can handle non-stop abuse, and then some.

Along with chips for video games, the plant also prepares products for Cisco, Chinese telecom giant Huawei and a host of other companies. Many of the microprocessors will eventually end up in IBM-branded servers-there's a Bromont chip inside every Big Blue machine worldwide, which means that every time you run a Google search, you're using high-end components from the only IBM manufacturing facility that resides in Canada. As Jean-Guy Fournier, the plant's spokesperson, puts it: "We're packing the BMWs, Mercedes and Ferraris here. The Ford Escorts are produced in the Far East."