Biography | Brian Krzanich — The Process Engineer Who Started on This New Mexico Site

Intel's later chief executives are remembered as Santa Clara office men. Krzanich's first badge was stamped in the desert. He joined the company in 1982 as a process engineer at the Rio Rancho factory, about fifteen miles north of Albuquerque. Intel had bought the first eighty acres here in March 1980, on land that had been a sod farm beside State Highway 528. Fab 7 was the plant that opened that year. It was Intel's first factory to run six-inch wafers. The site address that later public-health and company records use is 4100 Sara Road. Fabs 9, 11 and 11X grew on the same 218-acre campus. A process engineer's job is the chemistry of the line: how a wafer is cleaned, patterned, etched and tested so the yield holds. That is the work a chemistry bachelor's degree from San Jose State was hired to do. Krzanich stayed inside manufacturing for most of the next three decades. By 2007 he oversaw factories and the supply chain. In January 2012 he became chief operating officer. The New Mexico site is still Intel's campus in Sandoval County. The original Fab 7 building was later converted to test. The pin is the plant, not a vanished farmhouse. Photo: Intel campus, Rio Rancho, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Intel, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.