New computer chips to run 10 times faster. I wrote in this column that you could be sure that Moore's law will be broken not long after 2012. Gordon Moore, Intel co-founder postulated that the numbers of transistors a chip can hold will double every 18 to 24 months as transistor size shrinks.
Smaller transistors mean shorter interconnection lengths and faster running speeds.
Today's computer chips top out at speeds of about 1GigaHertz. That's 1,000,000,000 cycles per second. The basic problem lies in how small an electrical circuit line can be made. Microchips are produced using a technique called photolithography, a variation of the method used to produce art prints. A pure silicon glass wafer is coated with a photosensitive chemical, just like the film in a camera.