The technology also shrinks the devices to a width of about 80 atoms, Intel's director of components research, Gerald Marcyk, said Saturday. 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 co-founder 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. Intel's Pentium 4, by comparison, has about 42 million.