Intel 65nm CPU's coming soon

Quote:recent visit to Intel's D1D fab, we were able to get a sneak peak at the firms efforts and talked to some of the engineers working responsible for preparing new processors for mass production.

Today, a typical processor is developed within a period of 24 to 32 months, down from about 48 months a decade ago. The search for errors in the semiconductor design and manufacturing takes place during this research development phase, but also throughout the time the CPU is commercially available. While error detection and correction is the main task during development, engineers typically focus on enhancements to the design during a chip's product cycle.

Intel's Technology and Development Group (TD) is responsible for finding errors and getting them fixed. If a problem is reported, there are engineers who often will have to find that one individual transistor that is causing the problem, describing the issue to the designer who then is able to correct it. While testing is largely automated and the general problem usually hints to a certain area into a chip, the sheer amount of transistors - 1.7 billion in the future Itanium 2 CPU - create a perfect needle in a haystack problem.

The process of finding and correcting an error typically is referred to as "nano surgery", which involves corrections in semiconductors that involve structures smaller than 10 nm. Markus Kuhn, group leader in Intel's Technology and Development Group, told us that the firm currently can see down to a 5 nm level. "What we do is basically trying to control atoms on a surface level," he said.

This appears not to be exaggerated considering the fact that it is atoms which are influencing production yields and bringing a variation in output to semiconductor manufacturing. Steven Megli, co-plant manager of Intel's Fab 12 in Chandler, Ariz., mentioned that it can be simply a difference in humidity between the factory where a manufacturing process was developed and a facility which tries to duplicate that process that causes substantial differences in yield. "We spent weeks to create the same air quality in Chandler as we have it in Oregon," he said. While the firm aims for exactly duplicating a manufacturing environment in multiple locations around the world, Megli conceded that this is an impossible task, as individual unexpected atoms floating in the air can disrupt production yields. "We are happy if we can achieve about 90 percent of the exact same environment," he told us.