Images: 35 years of Intel chip design

A 45-nanometer test chip. The top third consists of memory cells. The middle section contains circuits for input, output and other functions. Those transistors are made so that Intel can test how different transistors come out on the new process. The bottom part is a tester.

Intel says it will likely begin shipping processors, flash, and other chips based on that process in the second half of 2007. The test chips, produced in January 2006, are static SRAM memory chips containing 153 megabits of memory. The chips contain over a billion transistors and are nearly the same size as test SRAM chips produced by Intel in 2000 on the then-new 130-nanometer process that contained 18 megabits of memory. The memory cells on the 45-nanometer test chips take up 0.346 square microns, compared to 2.45 square microns.