Intel reinvents the transistor as a 3D Tri-Gate

I found the information about the size of the 3d transistors interesting. Does this mean that Intel is currently able to develop and manufacture nanotechnology devices (1 to 100 nanometres)?

For example, in the video the red blood cell was much larger than the 3d transistors. If Intel is able to develop transistors which are on the same scale as small theoretic nanotechnology devices, why aren't we getting access to a lot of nanotechnology applications yet?

For example these nanotechnology applications: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nanotechnology_applicat...

intel provided the ability for someone else to create it. intel does chips, people take those chips, and make great things. intel doesnt do that. its up to us now, lol

Sorry, yes, that was what I should have wrote

I work at Texas Instruments, and the fab I'm in does a 32nm process. The problem is the methods used to make microchips vs mechanical working parts would be vastly different.

If you were to make a gear at 22nm then blow it up to say 5 inches wide, it would be the most terribly machined gear you ever saw. Heck it might look like a roughly notched rock. Precision has to be refined at this level to make complicated nano technology

You have to understand just how these chips are made. You start with a wafer, send it to thin films cover it in a uv resistant coating affectionately named photo resist, send it to photo lithography, expose it to uv light through a precision laser etched crystal reticle to overlay a schematic design for the bottom layer of the chip, then you ash the wafer to remove all the parts of the photo resist that the UV light did or didn't soften/harden (there are positive and negative photo resist types) then send it to implant and implant materials such as boron, phosphorus and other materials that will change the electrical properties of the wafer where implanted, then UV expose again, ash it, now yo have the bottom the wafer is annealed to bring the implanted particles to the top. Sometimes there is etching before any of this happens. Then you build the wires above the silicon connecting all the parts, and sometimes growing silicon in upper layers just to add more parts to the circuitry. All through the use of etching(plasma, acid and others), photographically, ashing among other things and there are many many quality checks along the way just to make sure everything is going well. (no reason to waste a month of process time on a chip that won't work because of something that happened at the beginning of the processing. Basically everything is done in layers. It can take months for chips to go from silicon to shippable chips. I suppose you might be able to build mechanical object with photo-lithography and I'm sure it has been done, but until processes are refined to where the objects don't look as rough under a microscope as they do, then I don't think it is very feasible.

Edit: On another note, now that we're able to make 22nm chips, by using the same process we should be able to produce larger nano objects with greater precision, like say 100-200nm. But as for 22nm precision, it's going to take a while to get machine shop quality parts when scaled to large size at the 22nm size.

You're joking, right? A sizeable number of people here on HN read the comments before reading the item, partly because the comments often have more information than the item, and partly because the title is often less of a guide to the quality than the comments. I always check the comments first, not least, in addition to the above, they usually load faster.