Intel and IBM have announced separately new semiconductor technologies and manufacturing processes that could produce chips 10 times faster than those now available.
The two companies, rivals in portions of the chip industry, made the announcements at the International Electronic Design Manufacturers show in San Francisco.
One of the biggest goals in the chip industry is to cram more and more transistors onto a smaller silicon chip, which boosts power and cuts costs.
Intel has developed a transistor that is just 0.03 microns wide, allowing the chipmaker to build microprocessors that have more than 400 million transistors and run at 10 gigahertz.
These super-speedy transistors - which act like switches controlling the flow of electrons in a microchip - could complete 400 million calculations in the blink of an eye or finish 2 million calculations in the time it takes a bullet fired from a gun to travel one inch.
That type of speed and performance, Intel said, would make real the possibility of real-time voice translation, for example. The tiny, speedy transistor would also mean that a US$1,500 computer using a chip with the transistors would have as much power as some mainframe computers available now, costing millions of dollars.
Intel said it expects to have product available commercially by 2005 and that the chips will consume less than 1 watt of electricity.
"This demonstrates there's no fundamental barrier to scaling Moore's Law until the middle of the decade," said Rob Willoner, a market analyst in Intel's technology and manufacturing group.
Moore's Law, formulated by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore decades ago, stipulates that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 18 months. More transistors in a microprocessor mean power and performance.
IBM said it introduced a manufacturing technology to build chips where the width of the lines used to etch circuits are 0.13 microns wide. A micron is the width of a human hair.
IBM said the new process will use copper wiring, as well as silicon-on-insulator and other technologies to manufacture the semiconductors. IBM said it expects to start using the new process technology in some of its products by the first quarter of 2001.
I have no clue as to what you mean by the word "calculation" or how long it takes a bullet to travel one inch. Also a micron is much smaller than the width of ahuman hair. A hair is more like 100 microns.