An electron microscope image of a single transistor (the mushroom-looking thing in the top half of the photo). It is so small that it would fit inside a strand of DNA. By 2007, Intel expects to put about 1 billion of these tran-sistors into a processor the size of a fingernail.

For a while there, it looked as though Moore's law was about to be overturned. Moore's law says that the number of transistors packed onto a sliver of silicon will double every two years.

Packing more transistors into a processor has become the Holy Grail of semiconductor manufacturing: more transistors equates to to more computing power and if you can make them faster at the same time, you obviously get a faster, more powerful computer.

But with transistors already too small to be seen except through a very powerful microscope, Moore's law looked to be in jeopardy. Until Intel researchers stepped in, that is!

Intel has now developed the world's fastest – and smallest – transistors, ready to incorporate into the super microprocessors of tomorrow. At just 20 nanometres wide, there will be almost a billion crammed into the one chip, compared with the 42 million transistors on the current chip, the Pentium 4 processor.

The new (experimental) transistors are 30% smaller and 25% faster than the industry's current fastest transistors, also developed by Intel last year.