LAUSR

"A fab is like an iceberg," someone tells me. I can't tell who because we're all covered head to toe in clean-room garb. A tour of GlobalFoundries' Fab 8 in Malta, N.Y., certainly reinforces that analogy: We've just come up from the "sub-fab," the 10 meters of vertical space under the floor, where pipes and wires snake down from each semiconductor-manufacturing tool above to a set of automated chemical handlers, water analyzers, power conditioners, and-in the case of the unit I've come to see-kilowatt-class lasers.