nanometer

On Wednesday, President Obama is due to visit an Intel plant in Arizona. Here's why.

Obama aims to highlight manufacturing in America--one of the State of the Union's themes--and it's hard to find a better example of that than the world's leading chipmaker. Intel is now one of America's foremost manufacturers, boasting some of the most sophisticated manufacturing facilities in the world, many of them sprinkled throughout the U.S. 

Its development fabs (fabrication plants) in Oregon are the most cutting-edge of its leading-edge factories and have already received one presidential visit, in February … Read more

President Obama will visit Intel's Arizona plant on Wednesday in a nod to Intel's abiding U.S. manufacturing presence.

On Wednesday, following his State of the Union address Tuesday night, Obama will travel to Phoenix to deliver remarks at Intel's Ocotillo campus in Chandler, a suburb of Phoenix.

The Arizona plant, designated Fab 42, is under construction now, with completion expected in 2013.

That plant will produce Intel's next generation of processors built on its 14-nanometer technology. To put that into perspective, Intel's upcoming "Ivy Bridge" processors, due in systems this spring, use … Read more

A chip analyst has written a sobering assessment of Intel's chip prowess vis-a-vis Apple in the mobile device race, an odd underdog position for the largest chipmaker.

In the brave new world of tablets and smartphones, chip competition isn't so much about Moore's Law but rather how the "blocks" of circuits are put together and the nexus with the software that runs on those circuits, Gus Richard, a senior research analyst at securities firm Piper Jaffray, wrote in a research note this week.

More specifically, tablets and smartphones use silicon called system-on-a-chip, or SoC, that … Read more

More details have emerged on Intel's first system-on-a-chip for mainstream PCs.

That chip, codenamed Haswell, is due by 2013 and will be the first high-performance Intel processor to approach the same level of integration used in smartphones and tablets. Today, Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, and Nvidia are the major suppliers of smartphone and tablet SoCs (system-on-a-chip) derived from the ARM design.

What does Haswell mean for future Macs and PCs? Even more powerful ultraslim MacBooks and laptop PCs will emerge--as well as hybrid laptop-tablet designs.

Imagine, for example, a future 15-inch MacBook Pro as skinny as a MacBook Air but … Read more

Way back in the early days of 2011, the world's smallest electric motor was so...big. At 200 nanometers wide, it was a whopping 1/300th the size of a human hair.

Now, chemists at Tufts University's School of Arts and Sciences have smashed that record, which was set in 2005, with this weekend's unveiling of their single-molecule electric motor, which at 1 nanometer wide could be the first in an entirely new class of devices with potential use in medicine and engineering.

That's right: 1 nanometer. That's been estimated to be about 1/60,… Read more

Intel made one its most significant technology announcements ever today by stating it will base upcoming processors on 3D transistors. So, what is a 3D transistor exactly and why is it important? Here are some answers.

What is 3D exactly?It can get confusing very quickly because there are a few technical terms being bandied about to describe the new transistor structure. Intel calls it generically 3D but technically it's a Tri-Gate transistor (see image below). The traditional flat two-dimensional "planar" gate is replaced with a thin three-dimensional silicon fin that rises up vertically from the silicon … Read more

Viruses are small. Very small. There are millions of types, and the 5,000 or so that have been studied in detail are typically between 10 and 300 nanometers (one-billionth of a meter) in diameter.

Because the wavelengths of visible light range from roughly 300 to 800 nanometers, viruses aren't exactly visible under normal lighting. Only optical fluoresce microscopes can see inside a virus, and then only indirectly, using dye, which cannot actually penetrate a virus.

So the "microsphere nanoscope" developed by scientists at the University of Manchester's School of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Civil Engineering in the U.K. and described in the journal Nature Communications is remarkable on two counts: It breaks the world record of direct imaging under normal lights by 20 times, viewing objects as small as 50 nm wide, and what's more, the tech behind it imposes no theoretical limit in the size of feature that can be seen.

This incredible jump in capacity could allow humans to see inside human cells and even live viruses for the first time, which in turn could give us many new insights into their structures and behaviors.… Read more

Intel traditionally builds chips for its own use, but it's now branching out to create one for another manufacturer.

Intel will create chips based on its 22-nanometer technology for Achronix Semiconductor, Achronix announced today. This marks the first time Intel is designing a chip for another manufacturer and may indicate that the chip giant is looking to do some contract manufacturing for outside customers.

Based in San Jose, Calif., Achronix will use Intel's 22-nanometer chips to develop its own Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). FPGAs are integrated circuits that can be programmed after they've been manufactured, allowing … Read more

Intel is pledging to spend between $6 billion and $8 billion to build a new chip manufacturing plant and upgrade its existing fabrication plants in Arizona and Oregon.

The influx of cash will allow Intel's new and current fab plants to put more muscle behind building the chipmaker's next-generation, 22-nanometer microprocessors, which could eventually power sleeker devices that deliver higher performance and longer battery life at a cheaper cost.

Intel's first microprocessors built on the 22-nanometer process, codenamed "Ivy Bridge," will be in production in late 2011, the chipmaker said today.

Besides kicking in money … Read more