Intel develops smallest transistor

Intel said yesterday it had developed the world's smallest and fastest transistor.

The company said it was likely to go into production in Intel's Kildare plant in about five years. The new transistor, part of which is only three atoms in size, will play a role in the move away from keyboards and towards more powerful computers that can input data by talking into them.

The breakthrough means that Moore's Law, which stipulates that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years, will remain on the books until at least 2007.

"There's been a lot of talk and concern about the end of Moore's Law," said Mr Gerald Marcyk, director of components research for Intel's technology and manufacturing group.

"So far, we haven't hit any fundamental limits with respect to our transistor technology"

Intel engineers in the US have designed and manufactured a handful of transistors that are only 20 nanometres, or 0.02 microns, in size.

The transistors found in the latest chips in use today measure 0.18 microns from one side of the transistor gate to the other.

The new transistors open the way for microprocessors containing close to 1 billion transistors running at 20 gigahertz by 2007.

Today's Pentium 4 processors have about 42 million transistors and run at 1.7 gigahertz.

A spokesman for Intel's Irish operation said it was its "absolute expectation" that the plant would in time produce the new technology.

The new development is about two generations down the line and should reach the Leixlip plant in about five years, he said.

Each generational change at the plant involves the installation of new equipment costing about £500 million (#635 million), the spokesman said.

Of course, a microprocessor is only as powerful and useful as the software programmes that are written to run on them. But processors with one billion transistors, Mr Marcyk said, left the field wide open.

For example, computers will be able to understand commands in natural language. An investor could check his stock portfolio in the morning and find that the computer had analysed the market and presented investment options.