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Entering Newport's fabrication plant is an other-worldly experience. Gloves, a white suit and hood need to be put on in the right order before stepping into a chamber where jets of air blast away remaining contaminants.

The process, a guide explains, is not to protect people, but the product. On the other side of the secure door, lies the UK's largest semi-conductor manufacturing facility, an environment one hundred times cleaner than a hospital operating theatre.

Inside ghostly white figures in suits move pods on trolleys. Robotic arms extract silicon wafers which are coated with photosensitive material. Then light is projected on to the wafer to print the pattern of the chips. What you end up with are semi-conductors - often known as microchips or just chips - on which much of our modern lives depend.

Every silicon product starts with a grain of sand," says Mary Curtis, a programme manager who has been working at the site for more than three decades, explaining that what comes out of the high-volume Newport plant ends up in cars around the semiconductor world as well as white goods like washing machines.

Newport has been operating since the 1980s but it has been thrust into the spotlight as an unlikely front-line in a new struggle between the West and China.

Last July, after it hit financial difficulties, Newport Wafer Fab was acquired by Nexperia, one of its customers. Nexperia is headquartered in the Netherlands but its ultimate owners are Chinese firm Wingtech Technology.