"The 32 nm technology is getting ready to go into the manufacturing phase, we are lining up fabs to support it and we expect great demand," said Mark Bohr, director of Intel's technology and manufacturing group. "We are on track for shipping products in the fourth quarter and have 22 nm technology in development for 2011," he said.

Intel will present 15 papers at ISSCC including four of eight at a session on microprocessors where it will describe its latest 45 nm Nehalem and Itanium chips. None of its rivals--Advanced Micro Devices, IBM or Sparc partners Fujitsu and Sun Microsystems—will present on their CPUs.

Bohr will give a keynote talk at ISSCC on the coming era of system-on-chip devices, using the integration in its latest Nehalem and mobile Atom processors as examples. "Modern microprocessors are truly digital SoCs because they include high performance logic, memory and analog circuits," Bohr said.

The company is actually something of a latecomer to SoCs. It launched a major initiative in the area in 2007 and debuted one of its first full blown SoCs, the Canmore TV chip, just last year.

Beyond its work in processors, Intel will present at ISSCC a wide range of papers.

For example, it will describe a 2.5 GSample/second analog-digital converter with 7-bit precision built from an array of simple ADC elements. It will also discuss a single instruction, multiple data accelerator that can run on as little as 230 millivolts.

"This will help us deliver better graphics on battery-powered systems," said Krishnamurthy Soumyanath, director of communications circuit research at Intel.