Intel announcement signals confidence in industry rebound. (First In/First Out).

Buried under all the bad news of the last few months, a small nugget of gold appeared, courtesy of the Intel Corporation, in the latter part of summer.

Intel, whose stock price has plummeted along with the stocks of most other high-tech companies, announced a move to large-volume fabrication of 90-nanometer (.09 micron) semiconductors, currently the smallest in the world. While other companies (most notably IBM) had previously announced many of the technology advances Intel will now implement, the Santa Clara chip giant will be the first to integrate them all into high-volume fabrication.

But perhaps even more important than the technical details of the announcement is its symbolic value. At a time when most companies are scaling back such investments, Intel's $2 billion investment in the new Leixlip, Ireland, facility that will produce the chips demonstrates the chip maker's confidence of a rebound in PC spending within two years. Construction on the new fab originally began in June 2000 but was halted during last year's economic slump. It is now scheduled for completion in 2004, and will employ 1,000. Fab 24, as the facility is known internally, is the largest single construction project in Ireland.

One of the first commercial chips to be made on Intel's process will is codenamed Prescott. This processor is based on the company's NetBurst microarchitecture and will be introduced in the second half of next year. Intel expects to have three 300-millimeter wafer-fabs using the 9Onm process by 2004.

The Intel chips will use a number of promising chip technologies, including strained silicon, 50nm (gate length) transistors, copper interconnects, and a new low-k dielectric material called carbon-doped oxide (CDO) which, according to Intel, increases signal speed inside the chip and also reduces power consumption.

While Intel has not announced the number of transistors the new chips will contain, in February the company used the 9Onm process to make 52Mb SRAM chips. Each chip included 330 million transistors in an area measuring only 109 square millimeters--about the size of a fingernail.

The 90 nm process will be ramped into high volume in Intel's 300 mm development fab in Hillsboro, Oregon, and then transferred to Ireland and other 300mm manufacturing fabs sometime next year.