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Intel now has the technology to make processors ten times faster than today's speediest Pentium 4, ensuring continued PC performance growth through at least the end of this decade.

Company officials claim researchers have fabricated the fastest silicon transistors ever built. The transistors, expected to appear by 2007, will lead to dramatically faster processors without the need for radical changes in the way Intel manufactures the chips.

The transistors are just 70 to 80 atoms in width and three atoms thick, says Rob Willoner, a market analyst with Intel's technology and manufacturing group. Transistors act like tiny switches that control the flow of electrons through a chip, and Intel says a PC can turn its minuscule components on and off 1.5 trillion times a second. That makes them the world's fastest transistors--even smaller than the ones Intel unveiled late last year during a similar announcement.

Intel says it will be able to cram as many as 1 billion of these new transistors on a single microprocessor, boosting the speed of its chips to about 20 GHz. Intel's fastest processor to date, the Pentium 4, has 42 million transistors and runs at 1.7 GHz.

Intel announced its breakthrough over the weekend at a semiconductor conference in Kyoto, Japan.

Once Again, Moore's Law Continues

The achievement is important because it suggests that semiconductor makers will be able to keep pace with Moore's Law until the end of the decade using roughly the same materials and manufacturing techniques used today, says Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst with Insight-64. Moore's Law states that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 18 months.

"People are always getting nervous about how much more headroom silicon technology has before we run up against some fundamental limit that could cause Moore's Law to grind to a halt," Brookwood says. "What Intel is saying is that, with some work, they think they have knocked down all the brick walls between now and the end of the decade."

Intel's Willoner admits, however, that while the company's breakthrough is significant, there is still more work to be done. Intel developed the transistors in small quantities--fewer than 100 to a chip--and under artificial laboratory conditions, he says. The company has several technology hurdles to cross before it can make billion-transistor chips in high volume.

"Obviously we have to make many changes, but they're evolutionary changes rather than revolutionary," Willoner says.

For example, today's lithography techniques used to burn circuits onto the surface of chips are nearing certain physical limits. Intel's engineers used tricks such as over-exposing the light to create their transistors, but that method won't be practical for volume production.

Intel expects to use a technology called Extreme Ultra Violet (EUV) lithography to print its billion-transistor chips. A consortium of companies including Intel, IBM, Advanced Micro Devices, and Motorola are working now to develop that method.

Heat a Problem?

Another significant challenge that lies ahead is dealing with heat. As the transistor count increases, so does the amount of heat the chip produces. At a chip conference in San Francisco earlier this year, an Intel executive warned that if engineers don't devise some creative methods to reduce heat put out by the chips, computer chips will have "thermal densities that are greater than a nuclear reactor."

Other issues to be addressed include improving the interconnects that link transistors together, and cutting down on electrical leakage between the tiny components, Willoner says. Nevertheless, he says he is confident Intel can overcome the hurdles.

"We've shown that we know how to do nanotechnology with silicon ... and that has clear advantages, because we know how to get silicon into volume production--we're doing it today," he says.

Intel will use the tiny transistors in high-performance chips that could help change the way people interact with computers. The increased power of PCs using those chips could allow for more natural speech recognition and could even offer the ability for users to control their computer via body and facial gestures, he says.

The extra power could also endow computers with greater intelligence that might help them predict what users want them to do next, based on their past behavior or by interpreting body language, Willoner says.

IBM said last week that it has figured out a way to boost processor performance up to 35 percent by stretching the silicon it uses to make processors. That allows electrons to move faster through the transistors on a chip, boosting performance. IBM expects to begin using the technique, dubbed strained silicon, by 2003.

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