Intel’s Folsom Unit Breaks Chip Barrier: The First Mass-Produced Microprocessor Using 45-Nanometer Technology is Set to Go This Month.
By Clint Swett, The Sacramento Bee, Calif.
Nov. 3–When Intel Corp. rolls out its latest generation of microprocessors Nov. 12, a team of 500 engineers at the company’s Folsom campus will have played the leading role in getting it from drawing board to circuit board.
The group has been central to the conception, design and testing of the chip, code-named Penryn, which initially will go into high-end servers but within a few months find its way into the newest models of desktop and laptop computers from Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Dell and other manufacturers.
“It’s one of the biggest and most complex projects we’ve ever done in Folsom,” said Brad Heaney, Penryn design manager since 2003.
Penryn, which will be made at an Intel fabrication plant in Hillsboro, Ore., is the first microprocessor to be mass-produced using 45-nanometer manufacturing. Currently, Intel’s fastest chips, such as the Core 2 Duo, are built to 65-nanometer specifications.
Forty-five-nanometer technology allowed engineers to pack 410 million transistors onto a tiny piece of silicon. That compares with the now-paltry 1.2 million transistors that were embedded on the Intel 486 microprocessor, considered a silicon screamer in the late 1980s.
Each of the Penryn transistors is just 1/2,000th the width of a human hair, and some of the 4 billion wires connecting the transistors measure only three atoms wide. All that is jammed onto a piece of silicon one-quarter the size of a postage stamp.
More transistors equal more computing power, and the smaller the size, the cheaper they are to produce, resulting in higher profit margins, said Nathan Brookwood, a research fellow at the market research firm Insight 64 in Saratoga.
With some other tweaks, the chips will draw less power and operate more efficiently than earlier versions, producing less heat on servers and sucking up less power from laptop batteries.
“The big story is that Intel is ready to roll with 45 nanometer long before anyone else,” Brookwood said. That could put more distance between Intel and chip rivals such as AMD and IBM.
Intel officials haven’t released prices for the new models. They also won’t say how many Penryn chips they expect to produce between now and the end of Penryn’s expected life cycle in 2010, but they project it to be the biggest revenue generator for the next several years.
Computer users likely won’t notice a big difference when Web surfing or e-mailing using Penryn-equipped computers. But as they take on more power-intensive tasks — encoding a movie from a video camera to a DVD, for instance — they could see an average speed improvement of 25 percent over the current generation of chips.
At Intel’s 6,800-employee Folsom campus, a team of engineers mapped out what capabilities Penryn should have by talking with computer makers and technology partners such as software developers.
They then went to work designing the chip, taking the basic design from the Core 2 Duo family and figuring how to squeeze it down to a 45-nanometer format while adding twice as many transistors.
They also pioneered some other improvements, including the addition of special metals that conduct electrical current through the chip more efficiently.
By 2006, most of the design work was done, and the first test chip was hand-carried to Folsom from Hillsboro on Dec. 20.
Since then, that chip and others have been undergoing exhaustive testing in sprawling labs in Folsom. In one area, the chips are installed in about 500 computers, where they run nearly every conceivable application, using software that the chips would run in real-world use.
In another they are stress-tested by being operated at various speeds and conditions to be sure they don’t fail once installed in computers.
One million-dollar machine allows an engineer to perform “microsurgery” on a chip, to shave transistors or perform other tweaks to improve performance. The altered chip is then tested again to see if it runs faster and more efficiently.
Each chip model — whether for server, desktop or laptop — undergoes more than 30 weeks of testing before it’s certified for commercial production, said Ed Lilya, the company’s manufacturing manager.
Even as the crew completes its work on Penryn, new challenges loom. The members are designing chips to 32-nanometer specifications and are looking ahead to developing a 22-nanometer chip.
Said Heaney, the Penryn design manager, of the never-ending quest for faster chips: “That’s just the name of the game.”
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