Intel continues to add new features and functions to the tiny silicon "engines" that are at the heart of an ever expanding, increasingly connected digital world. These silicon chips are powering the Internet, enabling mobile computing, automating factories, enhancing cell phones, and enriching home entertainment.

The most sophisticated silicon chip, a microprocessor, can contain hundreds of millions or billions of transistors interconnected by fine wires made of copper. Each transistor acts as an on/off switch, controlling the flow of electricity through the chip to send, receive and process information in a fraction of a second. Intel's microprocessors have evolved from single core processors to dual core and quad core processors. Quad core processors deliver four computing “brains” inside a single package.

Designing the schematics and masks
Silicon chip manufacturing starts with design specifications that define a chip's features. The specifications include chip size, number of transistors, testing, and production factors. Intel then creates thousands of schematics, symbolic representations of the transistors and interconnections that control the flow of electricity though a chip. Physical representations, stencil-like patterns or masks are made of each layer. Computer-aided design (CAD) workstations are used to perform comprehensive simulations and tests of the chip functions. The average time to design, test, and fine tune to make a chip ready for fabrication takes hundreds of people working full time for two years.

Fabrication
Fabrication is the process for making chips. The 'recipe' varies depending on the chip's proposed use and may require as many as three hundred steps to complete fabrication. Intel builds chips in batches on wafers in fabrication facilities or fabs. Intel uses wafers of silicon, a natural semiconductor. The wafers are sliced from 99.9999% purified silicon ingots and polished to a mirror smooth finish. A photolithographic "printing" process forms a chip's multi-layered transistors and interconnects (electrical passages) on a wafer. Hundreds of identical microprocessors are created in batches on a single silicon wafer. Once all the layers are completed a computer performs a process called wafer sort, to determine nonfunctioning chips and the remaining functional chips undergo a series of tests to ensure the chip circuits meet specifications to perform as designed.