[photopress:Paulottelini.jpg,full,alignright]Intel Corporation has completed its latest manufacturing facility in the capital of Southwest China’s Sichuan Province. Located in the Chengdu West High-Tech Industry Park, the new facility adds to Intel’s existing one-year-old chipset factory, which recently produced its 18.88 millionth chipset.
Paul Otellini seen smiling in the picture, president and chief executive officer of Intel, said that according to Chinese tradition, this number brings good luck and prosperity. 18,880,000 is a Chinese lucky number?
He said, ‘The new, leading-edge facility will play a key role in Intel’s global success, producing Intel’s newest 65 nanometer (nm), multi-core processors.’ The new facility will include a 65nm microprocessor assembly and test factory and a state-of-the-art training and conference centre.
So what is the big deal about 65 nanometers? Start by thinking of a meter length. You are probably under two meters but over one meter tall. Or if you stretched your arms wide fingertips to fingertips it would be about a meter. Or, more precisely, a meter is the length of the path traveled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second. But you knew that already.
If a centimeter, which which we are all also familiar, is 10 to the power of minus 2 then a nanometer is 10 to the power of minus 9. (Are there smaller sizes? Yes. Going down we have pico, femto, atto, zepto and yocto and, no, I do not know why ‘z’comes before ‘y’. Scientists are very odd. One wanted to call them harpo, zeppo, groucho, beppo but was howled down.)
Being able to make chips down in the nanometer territory means you can get more processing power on one chip. So the chip can be smaller OR the chip can be a lot more powerful. For the record Intel has actually produced one down to 45 nm which will be the next level.
This new factory will produce chips that fit customers needs. They want ever-smaller, multi-use devices, which means companies have to shrink their chips even as they combine more functions onto each one. And users want the products at a reasonable price, which requires more advanced production methods. The new plant at Chengdu fulfills these needs.
Source: China Daily
