Boffins secure the future for Moore's LawResearchers at McGill University in Montreal have discovered a new state of matter that they say could greatly extend Moore's Law. Engineers at companies like Intel and Advanced Micro Devices have long been cramming more and more transistors - the building blocks of the processor - onto a chip. Last autumn, for instance, Intel announced that each of its new Penryn chips hold 820 million transistors. The Penryn chip keeps alive the 40-year-old prediction by Gordon Moore that the number of transistors on a chip will double every two years.
