Intel creates world's fastest silicon transistors

Intel claims to have created the world's fastest silicon transistors.

The tiny switches turn on and off nearly 1,000 times more quickly than those powering current microprocessors.

Their size means more can be packed into the Pentium 4 making it more efficient. They are, however, not expected to be incorporated into processors until 2007.

Such processors are expected to play a big role in the growth of speech recognition and language translation applications and programs requiring a supercomputer.

The super-fast transistors, just announced at a silicon nanotechnology workshop in Kyoto, Japan, are just 20 nanometers wide. one nanometer is around 10,000 times narrower than a human hair.

One component of the transistor is only three atoms wide.

PA