What's tiny already and getting smaller and smaller?

No, not your mate sitting in a tree playing with a cheese grater, but transistors in integrated circuits. Do you remember when 90 nanometre fabrication technology for processors was considered an amazing feat of "micro engineering"? Sure you do - I can't be the only one fascinated by these things... anyway, now we're down to half that size, 45nm, as Intel announced that it has working Core 2 and Xeon processors made with tiny little transistors.

How small? Here's a picture of a 45nm transistor, taken with an electron microscope I believe:

The little white dots are individual atoms. By adding metal gates and a dielectric layer with Hafnium, Intel's been able to keep up with Moore's Law. The chip giant built SRAM parts last year with 45nm technology, and this year will see the release of the Penryn code-named processors, with 410 million transistors for the dual-core variant, and 820 million for the quad-core ones.

Most of the transistors will go on increased caches, interestingly enough. The 45nm technology should allow for higher clock speeds than is currently possible with 65nm parts however, and the smaller fabrication process promises higher performance by default - as well as lower power consumption.

How small can transistors become? That remains to be seen, but Intel promises 32nm in 2009 and 22nm in 2011. Be interesting to see how to solve the problem of creating light beams that are narrow enough to use on the masks for such fine processes.

I leave you with some 45nm Trivia, courtesy of Intel:

There are 1 billion nanometres (nm) in one metre. A metre is approximately 3 feet.

The original transistor built by Bell Labs in 1947 could be held in your hand, while hundreds of Intel’s new 45nm transistor can fit on the surface of a single red blood cell.

If a house shrunk at the same pace transistors have, you would not be able to see a house without a microscope. To see the 45nm transistor, you need a very advanced microscope.

The price of a transistor in one of Intel’s forthcoming next-generation processors - codenamed Penryn - will be about 1 millionth the average price of a transistor in 1968. If car prices had fallen at the same rate, a new car today would cost about 1 cent.

You could fit more than 2,000 45nm transistors across the width of a human hair.

You could fit more than 30,000 45nm transistors onto the head of a pin, which measures approximately 1.5 million nm.

More than 2,000 45nm transistors could fit on the period (estimated to be approximately 0.1 millimetres or 100,000nm in diameter) at the end of this sentence.

A 45nm transistor can switch on and off approximately 300 billion times a second. A beam of light travels less than a tenth of an inch during the time it takes a 45nm transistor to switch on and off.

45nm Size Comparison

o A nail = 20 million nm
o A human hair = 90,000nm
o Ragweed pollen = 20,000nm
o Bacteria = 2,000nm
o Intel 45nm transistor = 45nm
o Rhinovirus = 20nm
o Silicon atom = 0.24nm