The revision is necessary. Experts in the semiconductor industry believe there are only about 10 to 15 years left before chipmakers run out of ways to pack more transistors on chip, the technique to make chips faster. The 42 million transistors on the new Pentium 4 chip are each 0.18 microns wide or 180 nanometers. A human hair is 100 microns wide. It will be possible to shrink line widths to 0.025 microns or 25 nanometers by 2011, estimates the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, published in 1999.
More transistors mean faster chips.
By then, a billion transistors on a chip should be possible. That should produce chips that will run well over 10 GHz. It could go even smaller. N.C. Experts know the numbers they use are speculative. High pointed to a 1989 research paper project that looked ahead at what microprocessors might look like today.