Every year, faster and faster computers become available. The upcoming holiday season will be no exception, with some chip speeds already being advertised in terms of gigahertz, a thousand times faster than the more familiar yardstick of megahertz. We take for granted Moore's law, the idea that computers double their speed every 18 months or so.
Many experts believe the end is in sight.
At some point, traditional manufacturing procedures will hit a wall on the road to faster chips. But now, physicists may have found a way to help researchers go past this dead end. Yet, their technique would still retain the same basic manufacturing approach, known as optical lithography, which uses light to sculpt the components of computer chips. A computer chip is basically a grid of on-off switches connected to each other. Electrical current flows through these switches in order to perform the calculations needed to crunch numbers in spreadsheets, write letters on wordprocessors, and zap aliens in computer games.