The A5 processor - the brain in the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 - is now made in a sprawling 1.6 million square feet factory in Austin owned by Korean electronics giant Samsung Electronics, according to people familiar with the operation.One of the few major components to be sourced from within the United States, the A5 processor is built by Samsung in a newly constructed $3.6 billion non-memory chip production line that reached full production in early December.Nearly all of the output of the non-memory chip production from the factory - which is the size of about nine football fields - is dedicated to producing Apple chips, one of the people said. Samsung also produces NAND flash memory chips in Austin.Samsung has added about 1,100 jobs to support the new non-memory chip production in the factory, which produces 40,000 silicon wafers every month, a Samsung spokeswoman said. The rest of the 2,400 employees in Samsung's Austin location work in its NAND flash memory factory by the logic chip factory, she said. The Korean company, which began the US plant in 1996 to make its NAND flash memory chips, continues to produce them there alongside the A5. Samsung's factory is the largest foreign investment in Texas with a total investment of about $9bn, according to the Austin Chamber of Commerce.
