Every time I think that we have reached the smallest die size that anyone can make, something happens, and someone reduces it that one more time.
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip giant has created test chips made on the 45-nanometer process and will likely begin shipping processors, flash, and other chips based on that process in the second half of 2007, according to Mark Bohr, director of process architecture and integration at Intel.
The test chips, produced this month, are static SRAM memory chips containing 153 megabits of memory. The chips contain over a billion transistors and are nearly the same size as test SRAM chips produced by Intel in 2000 on the then-new 130-nanometer process that contained 18 megabits of memory. The memory cells on the 45-nanometer test chips take up 0.346 square microns, compared to 2.45 square microns.
So just for comparisons sake, remember that a human hair is around 60-90 microns. Amazing…
Did someone say Moore’s law?
Well, even with Moore’s law, everyone expected that the heat generated from the transistors would eventually stop our ability to make them smaller and smaller and pack more and more on a processor die.