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The Oregonian was a finalist in the Pulitzer
Prize explanatory category "for its richly illustrated reports on a breakthrough in producing the microprocessors that are a technological cornerstone of modern life," the judges said.
The staff entry included stories, graphics and video on the development
of Intel's new chip by reporters Mike Rogoway and Richard Read,
artist Steve Cowden and multimedia editor Judy Siviglia.
• Paul Otellini: Defying the laws of physics: Intel's CEO talks
about the company's new chip Read it here. They worked in secret, 600 of Intel's
top engineers, forbidden even from telling their families what they were doing.
Their task was nothing less than the reinvention of
the microprocessor, "open-heart surgery" on the electronic brain that will do the thinking in several generations
of computers to come.
 And Hillsboro --where Intel employs 16,000
--was the only place in the world where the company had the expertise
and equipment to figure out how. Without the overhaul, the rapid and regular advances
in computing power that made possible everything from the personal computer to the World Wide Web
over the past four decades would have come to a grinding
halt. Now, for the first time, the curtain is being drawn back on how the breakthrough happened.
There are no Oscars or Emmys for microprocessor design. But for the Oregon engineers, the December moment when their work paid off remains triumphant.
The problem for Intel --and the electronics industry
worldwide --is that computer circuitry has grown so tiny that existing designs can get no smaller.
Intel theorized it would have to reconstruct it using more efficient materials.
The company announced plans for a tinier circuitry resulting
in a new processor --code-named Penryn --in 2003,
long before anyone knew how to pull it off. That's the challenge Intel gave Thomas and his colleagues.
Microprocessors have infiltrated every aspect of our lives.
Laptops, cell phones, cars, televisions and nearly everything else that carries an electric current and performs a task
rely on the wondrous ability to process reams of data and make instant decisions about what to
do with that information.
The calculus behind computer chips, though, remains obscure.
Microprocessors are locked away, hidden from view. Even if
you tear open your cell phone or PC and examine the innards, the miniature features
that do the heavy lifting inside a computer are much thinner than a human hair, far beyond human sight.
Millions fit on the head of a pin. The work that goes into designing
processors is similarly arcane. The Hillsboro factory where Intel engineers design and build
new chips is just off Highway 26, less than 14 miles from downtown Portland.
But the company lets almost no outsiders see what's inside.
The key feature of a microprocessor is the transistor,
essentially a tiny on-off switch.
When it's on, electricity flows through; when it's off, the current stops.
A microprocessor, a good deal smaller than a postage stamp, contains
millions of these microscopic transistors. Intel packed more than 400 million onto Penryn. They switch on and off billions of times a second.
The trouble is that things had become so tiny --just five atoms thick at the on-off gate --that transistors could become
no smaller without allowing electricity to spill through when they are switched off.
That would undermine a transistor's key function, crippling the microprocessor.
The chip industry has long been guided by a maxim
known as Moore's Law, coined in 1965 by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore.
His theory holds that the number of transistors on a computer chip will double about every two years, bringing with
it a reliably regular cycle of boosts in computing power.
Confronted by the atomic limitation in the size of its transistors,
Intel faced the end of Moore's Law and an end to decades of
rapid improvement in computing power. Jim McGregor, analyst for the chip-industry research firm In-Stat.
For Intel's solution, the company planned to replace
the transistor's basic materials. The problem was that no one knew which materials
would work, or in what combination. Intel's engineers had an exponential number of potential combinations to choose from as they ran through the periodic table.
Fairly quickly, Intel cooked up combos that could be used
to make transistors that performed better than the latest
traditional models. But they didn't perform consistently.
Kaizad Mistry, 45, a wavy-haired engineer from India whom Intel
put in charge of coordinating work on Penryn.
For its finished chips, Intel needed to ensure that the hundreds of millions of transistors in each chip all worked,
every time. And the company had to be able to manufacture several hundred of those chips at a time.
Intel's engineers perfect their chip recipes inside a giant clean room at a Hillsboro factory called D1D,
a facility 30 percent bigger in square footage than the U.S.
Bancorp Tower in Portland. Workers are cloaked head-to-toe in suits that
keep microscopic particles from their skin, hair or
breath from intruding on a chip under construction, potentially
fouling up its circuitry. The air is filtered, bathed in a yellowish light that won't interfere with the photographic process that etches designs onto chips.
Prince, the salt-and-pepper-haired engineer, spent last Thanksgiving in D1D, working through a key
phase of the design process as Intel researched a way to manufacture Penryn. While his wife and children attended a family dinner
near Seattle, Prince passed the day with other engineers
gowned in protective garb inside a clean room.
Skipping the holiday "didn't go over that well" with his family,
Prince said, but that late in the project every step was crucial.
He felt he couldn't be away. Amid the factory and all its high-tech equipment,
Intel's engineering team says, its breakthroughs most often came in quiet
moments away from the company's cubicle farms and equipment.
So Thomas frequently left his laptop at work and retreated to a bar or coffee
shop with nothing but a pen and a pad of paper. There, he could
reflect on how a problem might be approached, and devise a strategy for how to tackle it.
For Mistry, the time for reflection was his 45-minute commute home from Hillsboro to Lake
Oswego. Driving along in his '93 Honda Civic, Mistry said,
answers that had eluded him all day suddenly took shape.
In the 21st century, invention no longer springs only from eureka moments in basement labs and garages.
More often, teams of scientists work collaboratively in giant factories stocked with million-dollar research tools.
So it was with Penryn. Breakthroughs came steadily, step by step, as Intel perfected a secret cocktail of metals
that improved the way the chip manages electricity.
Each team took on one step in the process, and relied on others upstream and downstream to make sure their portions worked and fit.
Mistry, the engineer coordinating all the work.
Having first assembled a single working transistor, Intel's engineers eventually built a whole
microprocessor from hundreds of millions of them --and then came up with a
process to manufacture hundreds of processors at once.
That meant Penryn was ready, in theory, for prime time. In December, the
chip was sent out of state for assembly and testing, leaving the Oregon team that
designed it to wait. Mistry said the "paranoia index" among engineers
rose as they awaited results.
The self-induced paranoia motivated workers to check
and double-check everything about the chip. Word finally came
in the form of a midnight e-mail, sent from a computer
with Penryn inside, announcing that the chip worked the very first time testers plugged it in. After Intel announced its success to the world on Jan. 26,
other chip researchers rushed to announce that they had nearly perfected their own designs.
IBM, working jointly with Intel rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc., promised its own smaller chip early next year.
But as the first to enter mass production with the new
technology, and as the world's largest chipmaker, Intel's breakthrough is likely to set the standard.
Intel says its new chips will start showing up in computers by the
end of the year.
Eventually, chips incorporating Intel's new design will turn up in more powerful PCs, energy-efficient corporate computers and new generations of gadgets like the new iPhone that put the power of desktop computing wherever people
go. Even as Intel puts the finishing touches on its new chip, though, the engineers who made Penryn possible already are leaving the project to work on next-generation processors --due
in two years, just as Moore's Law predicts. Imagine a friend serves you an especially delicious cake and offers to share the recipe.
Seems like something you could make, until you get a
look at the ingredients: The eggs must come from the same farm where your friend got hers.
Flour, ground from the same crop of wheat. Water from the same tap.
That's how Intel makes its computer chips: It takes recipes cooked up by its Hillsboro
engineers, then copies them exactly at factories in such far-flung
locales as Arizona, New Mexico and Israel. Duplicating the technology means replicating the Hillsboro factory right down to
the air its technicians breathe. Any change, no matter how slight,
could wreck a chip's miniature features. For a powerful new chip that goes on sale Monday, the production strategy that Intel calls Copy Exactly
became many times more demanding than ever. Planning to
make the chip, code-named Penryn, started a year earlier
than usual for a new chip. And the company found Penryn could tolerate
even less variation than in previous chip upgrades.
John Pemberton, manager of a new Intel factory near
Phoenix that started making Penryn chips last
month. Intel, based in California, is the world's
largest chip maker and Oregon's largest private employer.
For this generation of chips, its Hillsboro engineers created a revolutionary transistor from new materials,
making possible chips that are smaller, faster and more efficient than any
that came before. Intel says the new technology boosts computing power by a fifth while decreasing
power consumption by a third. Computer technology goes stale in a matter of
months. So it's a race against time for Intel to duplicate its Oregon success and
bring its new chips to the world's computers before new designs from Intel or its rivals deliver more
whiz-bang.
Intel can't afford to be slow off the mark. And that's where Copy Exactly comes in. By replicating every variable --from each
factory's concrete foundation to the screws that hold
production equipment together --Intel assures itself that each plant will reliably turn out chips from
the moment production begins. Kaizad Mistry, the Hillsboro
engineer who managed work on Intel's new chip technology. For the new chip, Intel took some big risks.
Circuitry inside Intel's chips had grown so small,
just five atoms thick at one key spot, that it could shrink no more without creating breakdowns in performance.
Future advances in computing power were on the line.
So Intel's Oregon engineers ripped up the conventions of computer chips, replacing
the basic material at the heart of the chip with a previously untested cocktail of metals.
Their invention delivers improved performance with less energy.
Penryn, the first chip using the new technology, will start appearing in high-end computers this
fall. By this time next year, most new laptops and PCs using Intel chips
will have Penryn inside. With Penryn's robust computing power
and low demands on batteries, Intel hopes the new technology will find its way into
new, iPhone-style palmtop computers that are
surging in popularity around the world. |
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