Novellus Systems announced a 382,000-square-foot manufacturing and technology campus in Tualatin, Oregon, on May 9, 2002. The 58-acre site was built to support copper metallization and damascene dielectric-deposition equipment. It doubled manufacturing capacity for the company’s VECTOR and SEQUEL Express PECVD product families and expanded research and development for its SABRE copper-electrofill line.
What was Novellus’s Oregon copper campus?
The campus was a new manufacturing and process-development facility in Tualatin, in the greater Portland area. Novellus designed it around equipment used to deposit dielectric films and form copper interconnects in semiconductor manufacturing. The company described the site as a way to develop integrated copper dual-damascene processes for future high-productivity integrated circuits.
At 382,000 square feet across 58 acres, the facility brought together manufacturing, testing, and applications work. Novellus executive vice president Jeff Benzing said it expanded the company’s established presence in the Portland area.
How did the expansion double production capacity?
The increase applied specifically to manufacturing capacity for two PECVD product families, VECTOR and SEQUEL Express. PECVD, or plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition, is a process used to deposit thin films, including dielectric materials used in chip structures. The campus also added research and development space for SABRE, Novellus’s copper electrofill equipment line; the announcement did not say that SABRE manufacturing capacity doubled.
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The campus’s functions were supported by distinct cleanroom and lab spaces:
- Class 1000 cleanroom: system assembly.
- Class 100 cleanroom: system testing.
- Class 10 applications laboratory: process-development and applications work.
These classifications indicate increasingly stringent limits on airborne particles: Class 10 space is cleaner than Class 100, which is cleaner than Class 1000. The different environments suited different stages of equipment assembly, testing, and process work.
Why did copper interconnect technology matter?
Interconnects are the conductive wiring that links components on a chip. As the industry moved from aluminum toward copper for advanced devices, manufacturers sought to use copper’s lower electrical resistance while managing the difficulty of integrating copper with low-k dielectric films. Dual damascene is a fabrication approach that forms connected wiring features in dielectric material before filling them with metal.
Novellus’s SABRE line addressed copper electrofill—the process of depositing copper into those patterned features. Lam Research’s history of its Oregon operations says the work led to SABRE, which helped replace aluminum wiring and enabled faster, smaller, more energy-efficient chips. The campus therefore supported both PECVD equipment and the development of copper-plating technology, two complementary parts of the broader move to copper interconnects.
How does the campus fit Oregon’s semiconductor industry?
Novellus’s Tualatin expansion is part of a longer semiconductor-equipment presence in Oregon. In 2026, the Governor’s Office said a Lam Research expansion in Tualatin was expected to create more than 400 direct high-wage jobs and support thousands of indirect jobs. That later announcement illustrates the region’s continuing role in the industry; it is separate from the Novellus campus announcement in 2002.
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