Intel's Barrett Bets $28 Bln on Chips as Internet Push Flops
Santa Clara, California, Jan. 30 (Bloomberg) -- Everyone in Silicon Valley got a little crazy during the Internet boom, even Intel Corp., the world's biggest maker of computer chips.
Intel is doing at Ronler what it does best: milking Moore's law. So far, so good. The best Pentium 4 processor has 55 million transistors and runs at 3 gigahertz, meaning electrons race through the chip's microscopic wires and turn the transistors on and off 3 billion times a second. Pentium IIIs from two years ago had 28 million transistors and ran at 1 gigahertz.
Sustaining Moore's law isn't easy -- or cheap. Intel and its rivals make semiconductors by imprinting patterns of circuits on silicon dioxide with ultraviolet light and then removing the bits that aren't exposed. Soon, the circuits will have to be smaller than the wavelength of the light that creates them.
``It's like painting thin lines with a big brush,'' says Sunlin Chou, senior vice president of technology and manufacturing.
$2.5 Billion Plant
The solution is to use smaller wavelengths. The catch is that the higher-intensity light burns the quartz lenses that focus the light on the silicon. Chou's staff is working on mirrors that will reflect light onto silicon instead. The mirrors need an 80-layer coating of materials to withstand the heat. Such solutions will cost millions of dollars. Intel's big stumbling block involves getting all of the Wi-Fi circuitry onto the Banias chip -- or onto Banias and one other chip -- and then mass-producing them efficiently. Transistors that process radio signals such as Wi-Fi are larger and tougher to shrink than the circuits that make up microprocessors, making the benefits of Moore's law harder to capture.
JMAR anyone?
``We're one of the few companies around that can continue to invest in state-of-the-art manufacturing,'' says Barrett, who spent $4.7 billion on new plants in 2002 and plans to spend as much as $3.9 billion this year. Advanced Micro, by contrast, spent $750 million last year.
Fab D1D, the newest at Ronler, will have cost Intel about $2.5 billion once it's completed this year. Ronler's 5,000 workers will be able to walk through three-quarters of a mile of continuous clean rooms, in which there are only 10 dust particles per square foot.
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