Intel's Nick Knupffer is one of the company's web-logging representatives. Yesterday he blogged about the up-coming 45nm high-k metal gate chips that'll be rolling out of Fab 32 in just a few weeks. We got permission from Nick to republish his latest blog entry here on HEXUS.
45 is an important number. In 45 BC Julius Caesar won a victory over the armies of Pompey and proclaimed himself the sole ruler of Rome. Some 2000 years later, in 1945 the allies won a victory over the Axis powers. Both victories signaled huge changes in the world and moved it forwards in a new direction.
Now in 45 days time, something will happen that is not as extraordinary as the deeds of Caesar and Churchill, but it certainly does have the power to change and move the world forward.
In 45 days, a new building called “Fab 32” tucked into a sleepy corner of Arizona will come to life. Inside this building a new type of device will be made in incredible numbers. These devices will be able to shop for groceries, analyze proteins, play computer games, model financial markets, allow you to chat to your aunt in Australia, design automobiles and search for aliens. And these devices will do so faster than ever before, cooler than ever before and better than ever before.
I am of course talking about Intel‘s new high-k and metal gate based 45nm chips. The champion of technology and the true revolutionary; Gordon Moore said earlier this year – “…high-k and metal materials marks the biggest change in transistor technology since the introduction of polysilicon gate MOS transistors in the late 1960s.” Like the original silicon MOS transistors, the devices created at this new manufacturing fab will be forged with new ideas and new materials including — Hafnium. The new fab will be the world’s first 45nm (nanometer = teeny-tiny) facility to make Intel’s latest generation microprocessors based on the new high-k metal gate transistors, and do so in colossal numbers.
Head over to Nick's blog for the remainder of this installment.
