Chip company Intel has started manufacturing 0.18 micron silicon at its fab 20 chip plant and is likely to demo a 1GHz processor by year end, it said today. Pierre Mirjolet, architecture marketing manager at Intel EMEA, would not be tied down to when samples will go out to customers but his slide presentation showed that could be as early as February 2000. (See slides: Intel's plans for 1GHz microprocessors) He did, however, say that Intel will have 0.18 micron processors in production at year end with clock speeds 600MHz and greater. The first .18 micron chips will, however, be mobile parts, available in June, he said. Mirjolet said that by this time next year, Intel would have three of its fabs producing 0.18 micron technology and was likely to have two more in place shortly afterwards. While Fab 20 in Oregon was a development plant, Mirjolet said that it will move to a full production fab. That was to avoid what Intel describes as "knowledge leakage", where development fabs "threw their designs over a wall" and expected other factories to immediately start full scale production, cold. Intel has already started shipping a flip-chip packaging for its 0.18 micron processors within the SECC-2 package, said Mirjolet. That has the advantage of providing better connections and so supporting faster bus speeds, he said. ®