Sep. 25--Moore's Law, the famous doctrine that has served as the guiding principle of the semiconductor industry since it was postulated by the co-founder of Intel Corp., is alive and well.

That's the word this week from Intel President Paul Otellini, who displayed the latest chips from the company's technical wizards at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco.

The new chip lowers the size of features in the circuitry to 22 nanometers, and the thumbnail-sized pieces of silicon each contain nearly 3 billion transistors. That's about double the number on the 32-namometer chips that are the current state of the art and will enter mass production in the fourth quarter of this year. In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore said the number of transistors that can be incorporated on a chip will about double every 24 months.

Otellini said the devices shown Tuesday are the world's first working chips using the 22-nanometer manufacturing process, and they could be in mass production in 2011.

"We're already moving ahead with development of our 22-nanometer manufacturing technology and have built working chips that will pave the way for production of still more powerful and more capable processors," he said.

Many of Intel's current chips use 45-nanometer technology -- an impressive feat of miniaturization in itself. By comparison, a human hair is about 100,000 nanometers wide.

The smaller the circuitry features, the more of them that can be packed onto a single chip. That makes them faster and capable of ever more complex tasks such as creating vivid graphics.

The 32- and 22-nanometer technology is driving more innovative applications such as new in-car devices developed by Harman International Industries that will use Intel microprocessors to provide full Internet access, 3-D navigation, brilliant graphics and high-speed wireless connectivity, Otellini said.

The push toward 22-nanometer production has ramifications for Intel's massive Ocotillo campus in Chandler. The company is giving the manufacturing center a $3 billion makeover that will combine two existing fabricating plants, or fabs, into a single "megafab." The new mega-fab will have the capability of producing 32-nanometer chips and is scheduled to be completed by the end of next year. That means it could become obsolete quickly, but that's something Intel anticipated, said spokeswoman Dawn Jones.

"The technology changes pretty much every 18 months," she said. "We are continually upgrading our equipment to keep up with the latest technology."

That raises the prospect the mega-fab could be re-equipped with new manufacturing tools as successive generations of integrated circuits move into production, but Jones declined to say

-----

To see more of The Tribune, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.eastvalleytribune.com.

Copyright (c) 2009, The Tribune, Mesa, Ariz.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.

A service of YellowBrix, Inc.