Intel Shrinks Chip Circuitry to a New Scale

In a technical breakthrough that might ultimately increase the speed of microprocessors by orders of magnitude, chip giant Intel Corp. will announce at an engineering conference today a breakthrough that has already produced circuitry structures on the scale of 0.03 micron (a micron is one millionth of a meter).

Commercial chips on a 0.03-micron scale could contain about 400 million circuits, 10 times the number found on today’s most powerful microchips. If they can be produced, such processors could execute 20 trillion calculations per second, vastly increasing the computing power available to a range of products, including PCs and hand-held computers, and potentially opening up new kinds of computing applications.

The most advanced of today’s commercial microprocessors are built on the scale of 0.18 micron. Intel expects the new technology to be commercially viable in about five years.

That estimate assumes, however, that new manufacturing techniques will be developed.