How Many Transistors Can you Fit in Your Dot?

It may be because I don't follow Intel too closely but I was surprised that I didn't know that Intel had already rolled out a chip based on the next generation 45-nanometer manufacturing process. You can almost see the smile behind the mask of this Intel engineer holding a 45-nm wafer that has roughly 1.9 billion transistors (do you think he double checked that count just to make sure?). Intel is planning to spend $8 billion to upgrade factories to design the chips.

Just last week I wrote a blog post showing how a gig just isn't what it used to be. In that same post I wrote that it could be 15-20 years before transistors reach the size of atoms. Now Intel is saying they'll have 32-nanometer chips in production in 2009. To be sure the transistors on a 32-nm fab are not the size of atoms. But just how big are they? Stacy over at GigaOm breaks it down for us:

The different nodes measure the size of the chips, with the 32-nanometer node containing 4 million transistors in a dot the size of a period.

Okay so if the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every 2 years we have the following 15 year schedule starting in 2008:

Year 1: 2009 - 4 million transistors in a dot the size of a period

Year 3: 2011 - 8 million transistors in a dot the size of a period
Year 5: 2013 - 16 million transistors in a dot the size of a period
Year 7: 2015 - 32 million transistors in a dot the size of a period
Year 9: 2017 - 64 million transistors in a dot the size of a period
Year 11: 2019 - 128 million transistors in a dot the size of a period
Year 13: 2021 - 256 million transistors in a dot the size of a period
Year 15: 2023 - 512 million transistors in a dot the size of a period

So in fifteen years Intel should be squeezing 512 million transistors into a dot the size of a period? That sounds like a lot, but is it approaching the size of an atom? I'm not all too familiar with atoms, but it seems the diameter of an atom is around 10^-8 cm. This doesn't mean much to me as I'm sure it doesn't to you, so here are some comparisons I found on to make this problem a little easier to grasp:

• "An atom is a million times smaller than the thickest human hair."
• "Take a piece of spaghetti and divided it 12 times. That comes out to be 4,096 pieces of spaghetti. If you were to divide each of those pieces 30 more times that would be about the size of an atom."
• "If an atom were the size of a period, a person would have to be over 1000 miles tall."
• "A single carat diamond with a mass of 0.2 g contains about 10 sextillion (10²²) atoms of carbon."

Okay I give up, my brain just wasn't mean to understand atoms. Maybe one of my smart readers can tell me if 512 million transistors in the size of a period is getting close to the atomic level? I for one would love to know . . .