Intel shrinks chips to 90 nanometres

Intel has produced memory chips containing 330 million transistors through manufacturing technology that will hit the mainstream in 2003.

The experimental SRAM (static RAM) chips measure approximately 109 square millimetres and contain up to 52 million bits of data, making them the densest SRAM chips ever produced.

The chips also show that Intel is still meeting Moore's Law - whereby the number of transistors on a given chip doubles every 18 to 24 months, mostly because engineers find ways to shrink the size of the transistors.

The fastest chips are made on the 130-nanometre process (circuits inside the chip measure around 130 nanometres wide), but by shrinking the average feature size to 90 nanometres, Intel can cut the size of the processors in half or, add more features to its chips because it will be able to put twice the number of transistors in the same area.