If successful outside the lab, the technology, unveiled Wednesday, will ensure chip makers can maintain the growth in processing power that has driven computer sales over the past 30 years. In 1965, Intel Corp. co-founder Gordon Moore said the number of transistors on a chip would double every 18 months. So far, Moore's Law has held true. But some had feared the industry quickly was approaching the physical limits of silicon, with each new chip that shrinks the size and increases the number of transistors. Transistors are printed into microchips using a technique called lithography.
Light passes through a mask of the chip design and is projected onto the silicon wafer.
Light-sensitive chemicals then etch in the desired pattern. Using today's technique of deep ultraviolet lithography, manufacturers can print circuits as small as .1 micron, or one-thousandth the width of a human hair. Under current rates of innovation, the limits of what can be printed would be reached in 2004 or 2005. The new machine, using a process called extreme ultraviolet lithography, reduces the size of features on silicon to at least .03 microns. With that, the number of transistors on a chip could continue to expand under Moore's Law until about 2010.