Intel has devised a new structure for transistors in a development it said could mean microprocessors that run at very high speeds and consume far less power than conventional ones.
Intel said the technology solves the problems of excessive power consumption and heat. These factors are slowing up the development and manufacture of microprocessors as more and more transistors are packed onto each chip.
A spokeswoman for Intel in Ireland, Ms Karina Howley told ireland.comthe new transistor was capable of turning on and off a trillion times a second.
"It would take a person 15 years to turn a light on and off that many times," she said.
Ms Howley said the new structure, which Intel calls the TeraHertz transistor, could lead to new devices, such as real-time voice and face recognition, computing without keyboards and ever-smaller electronic gadgets with higher performance and improved battery life.
Ms Howley said it was good news for the company and therefore good news for the company’s operation in Ireland, in time it could be produced here, she added. It is not due to hit the markets until 2005.
Mr Dan Hutchinson, analyst of market research firm VLSI Research, said Intel had completely re-engineered the transistor as we know it.
"The real significance of this is that they've basically invented a new transistor technology that's fundamentally different, and it's manufacturable [sic]," said.
The technology that Intel is using in the TeraHertz transistor is also important because it is another step in extending Moore's Law into the next decade.
Moore's Law is an observation named after Intel co-founder Mr Gordon Moore. He noted in 1965 that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 18 months to 24 months with an attendant 50 percent cut in cost.
"What's going to limit transistor performance is the power consumption, not the speed and not the size," said Mr Gerald Marcyk, director of components research in Intel's technology and manufacturing group.
He said Intel is aiming to have 25 times more transistors in processors than in current ones, running at 10 times the speed, yet with no increase in power consumption.
The transistor most of the semiconductor industry uses is called complementary metal-oxide semiconductor transistor, a switch that, when "flipped," allows current to pass through, completing a circuit.
The combination of millions of "on" transistors, represented in the digital language by the numeral one and "off" transistors, represented by zero, flipping back and forth between the states is what allows a microprocessor to crunch and manipulate data.
Intel's flagship Pentium 4 chip has about 42 million transistors. Microprocessors with a billion transistors are expected in the second half of this decade.
Additional reporting