Intel, the computer chip giant, announced that it will produce four new products for 2007 that will be exclusively manufactured in Costa Rica.

The four new products to be produced at the Belén plant, will be processors that will incorporate the latest technology and thinner than a human hair. The firm says that the new products will be more efficient than past products.

The plant is located in la Ribera de Belén, across the highway from the Cerveceria Costa Rica and minutes from the Juan Santamaría (San José) International airport, and will procude the products with the brand names, Harpertown, Wolfedale, Tigerton and Montvale.

The processors will be used in applications by NASA, banks, airports, stock exchanges and communications.

For techies, the Harpertown is said to be a 45 nm, eight-core processor with 12 MiB of L2 cache, while the Tigerton is a quad-core, MP-capable processor to be released in place of Whitefield.

Intel has hoped to launch the new processors in 2006. However, quality tests showed some flaws in the processors and the product launch was moved to early 2007.

Intel has been in Costa Rica for the last 10 years and 99% of the processors procuded by the international corporation are produced in Costa Rica.

Karla Blanco, manager of corporate relations for Intel, said that a group of 50 Costa Rican engineers and designers have worked on the project, that will be used for portable computers known as the Penryn, that will feature four processing cores and will offer an expanded instruction set to process audio and video more efficiently.

Blanco added that Intel manufactures 26 products in Costa Rica, 12 of which are produced in the Belén facility.