Intel Corp. said it has created the world's fastest silicon transistors, tiny switches that turn on and off nearly 1,000 times more quickly than those that power today's microprocessors. The technology also shrinks the devices to a width of about 80 atoms, said Intel's director of components research, Gerald Marcyk. The transistors would not be incorporated into processors until 2007, Marcyk said.
Transistors are at the heart of all modern computers.
The opening and closing of their switches are the basis of all computations inside a microprocessor. In 1965, Intel cofounder Gordon Moore predicted that the number of transistors on a piece of silicon would double roughly every 18 months. Moore's Law, as the famous prediction is now known, has been amazingly accurate, largely thanks to new technologies that make transistors smaller and faster. Performance has followed a similar path. The first fully transistorized computer, built by IBM in 1954, had 2,000 transistors.