Biography | Craig Barrett — The Factories He Forced to Copy One Another

People remember Intel's 1980s rescue as a Grove speech about paranoia.

The shop-floor change had a different author.

In January 1985 Barrett was put over Intel's fabrication plants.

Japanese memory makers were beating the company on yield and cost. Grove and Moore asked manufacturing to cut costs hard, then cut them again.

Older lines in California, Oregon, Puerto Rico, and the Caribbean closed.

Barrett's lasting rule was simpler than the closures.

Each new factory would copy a proven development line in every detail that could be written down: same tools, same recipe, same layout.

The method later called Copy Exactly grew from those mid-1980s transfers.

Oregon was the proving ground.

Intel's Jones Farm campus at 2111 Northeast 25th Avenue in Hillsboro is the public address of that manufacturing system.

Development fabs in the Portland area learned a process at volume. Other sites were then told to reproduce it rather than improve it locally.

Plant managers who had run their rooms as separate kingdoms lost the vote.

A later account of a meeting with twenty-one manufacturing managers has Barrett keeping the twenty-second vote.

The point was not style. It was to stop a product from becoming a different product when it moved from one building to another.

Yields rose. By the late 1980s Intel could treat a microprocessor as something it could sole-source because the factories finally agreed with one another.

Photo: Intel Free Press, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.