Descending into the bowels of Utah-based IM Flash Technologies’ gigantic Lehi plant, you get the feeling you’re taking a tour of a hardened cold-war era secret underground government facility.

Its cavernous rooms deep below ground house tanks holding more than 1 million gallons of fresh or recycled water. Electrical and water pipes scatter as far as the eye can see lining concrete walls and ceilings down vanishing hallways with no apparent end. The Lehi plant generates its own power and sports a special air filtration system eliminating dust in its clean rooms where its NAND Flash memory is produced.

Even the clean rooms are big with vast tracks of spotlessly maintained white walls, ceilings and floors dotted with hundreds of scurrying people covered head-to-toe in white bunny suits. Overhead, a robotic track system delivers pods of silicon wafers appearing out of nowhere then disappearing just as fast to some other area in the facility.

It’s curious to think the sole purpose of a plant this huge is to produce the NAND Flash memory chip the size of your fingernail giving life to the iPod, cell phone or digital camera in your pocket.

History and Culture
Micron began construction on the Lehi plant’s shell in 1995 hoping to boost its DRAM memory output but soon halted construction when the bottom fell out of the market and the plant set idle for a few years. Micron later partially staffed the uncompleted facility in 2000 with a few hundred employees doing memory testing work.

In 2005, Micron saw the value of converting the Lehi plant to produce NAND Flash memory and started courting partners to help fund the project and co-develop the technology. Micron quickly found that partner in Intel and the two companies formed IM Flash Technologies as a joint venture. IM Flash then began the time consuming and costly two-year process of completing work on the original plant. In early 2007, the plant shipped its first memory chips.

“There were other partners willing to write checks,” says Site Manager, Todd Matthews. “But the decision came down to finding the right partner. Everything that Micron was good at, Intel needed work on and everything that Intel was good at, Micron needed help with. It was a perfect match of strengths and weaknesses between the two companies.”

A surprisingly flat corporate structure and an innovative culture distilled out of the mixing of the two well-matched partners. IM Flash has two co-CEOs — Rod Morgan from the Micron side and Dave Baglee from Intel. Both proud engineering geeks with memory fabrication backgrounds, Baglee and Morgan don’t like titles or dictatorships. Most of IM Flash’s managers office in the same cube farms with their engineers to be close to the action and dialog. Intrapreneurship, communication and innovation are key as IM Flash constantly pushes the engineering envelope striving to cram more memory onto smaller chips — all while running the plant more efficiently. 

Looking to the Future
Currently the NAND Flash memory produced at IM Flash’s plant may be used for a wide variety of devices from iPods to digital cameras to airline flight recorder boxes.
The NAND market is exploding and IM Flash is in a prime position to capitalize on the insatiable demand for its memory. Apple has sold close to 150 million iPods since 2001, many of which use NAND Flash to store music. More than 1 billion mobile phones are now sold each year. Currently many of those mobile phones use some form of NAND memory, but in the future likely all mobile phones will have storage capacity as NAND becomes cheaper and consumer demand for mobile data storage increases.

Another big market beginning to emerge is the Solid State Disk (SSD) market. SSD drives will soon replace traditional computer hard drives. SSD drives have the potential to be more reliable than current hard drives since SSDs have no moving parts and SSDs can both store and retrieve data more quickly. Currently available SSDs are expensive and have lower capacities than existing traditional hard drives, but that will all change once IM Flash and its competitors like Toshiba and Samsung apply the same scaled production and efficiencies that has benefited NAND Flash production.

To deal with the foreseen increase in demand, IM Flash will soon launch a second plant in Singapore.

Economic Impact
IM Flash finds itself suddenly one of the largest private employers in Utah. Currently IM Flash has more than 1,600 employees with plans to top out around 1,800 at the Lehi plant. The company estimates it will dump more than $1 billion into the Utah economy over the next 10 years from payroll expenses alone.

Not only does IM Flash provide a high number of jobs, those jobs tend to be high-paying jobs. Engineers fresh out of college can start at more than $60,000 a year. IM Flash is an attractive option for high school grads too looking for a decent job. The company will hire unskilled employees straight out of high school, pay them at least $12 an hour starting wage, and then train those employees in a variety of technician programs.

In order to find new employees, IM Flash works with many of the local colleges and universities. “We’re working with schools like Weber State and Utah Valley University for technician-level employees,” says Matthews, “and Utah State University, the University of Utah and Brigham Young University to attract people on the engineering side. As we built the Lehi plant we heard from a lot of engineers who had left Utah in the past searching for work but were interested in moving back to work for us. We brought them home.

SIDEBAR 1
Raw Data
IM Flash Technologies

Location:
Lehi, Utah

Ownership:
Micron 51%; Intel 49%

Building construction costs:
$3 billion

Time spent building Lehi plant:
11.25 million man-hours

Concrete poured:
225,000 cubic yards (enough for 863 miles of sidewalk)

Plant size:
2.4 million square feet

Average water usage:
1 million gallons per day

Total length of all pipes in plant:
42 miles

Employees:
Currently 1,650 soon reaching approximately 1,800

Estimated payroll over the next 10 years:
$1 billion

First customer:
Apple bought first $500 million of plant’s output

SIDEBAR 2
What is NAND Flash Memory?
NAND Flash is type of solid state (no moving parts) memory used to store music, video or any kind of data. If you own a digital camera, then you have some form of NAND in your camera’s memory card. NAND is a nonvolatile form of memory, meaning once data is loaded into the memory, it will hold onto that data even when powered down. Other types of memory (like the RAM in your computer) lose all information and reset when power is cut to the chip.

Since NAND won’t lose data without power, it is ideally suited for a wide variety of uses including cell phones, PDAs, digital music players, automobile computers, gaming systems, flash thumb drives, digital cameras, barcode scanners, flight recorders and the new Solid State Disks (SSD) starting to replace computer hard drives.

IM Flash and its competitors like Samsung and Toshiba have developed highly tuned processes and facilities allowing vast amounts of data to be packed into very small chips mass-produced with incredible efficiency.

As demand has grown and manufacturing techniques matured, the price for better and better storage has plummeted over the years. For comparison’s sake, consider the first widely used computer storage system, the IBM 350 introduced to the market in 1956. The IBM 350 was a hard drive the size of a large refrigerator costing roughly $150,000 with a storage capacity of 5MB (about the size of one iTunes music track). Today, a NAND Flash card the size of your fingernail can easily store 1,000 times the data of the IBM 350 and retails for around $50.