SAN JOSE: IBM has pulled ahead of its rival Intel in the race to the microchip of the future with the announcement this week of the tiniest transistors ever made, but analysts say the competition has just begun.

Using technology developed at IBM’s Almaden Research Centre in San Jose and at New York laboratories in collaboration with GlobalFoundries and Samsung, the company’s scientists have created a “test” chip with transistors seven nanometers thick.

In comparison, a strand of DNA is 2.5 nanometers in width and a human hair is 80,000 to 100,000 nanometers wide.

The announcement means that in all likelihood Moore’s Law, which calls for the doubling of the number of transistors on a chip every two years, will continue at least through 2018.

The generations of microprocessors are called “nodes,” and current manufacturing is largely at the 14 and 22 nanometer nodes, with a 10-nanometer node in the wings, while researchers try to figure out a path to 7 nanometers.

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