JULIE BELLINGER, CONYERS, GEORGIA: Hello, my name is Julie Bellinger. I'm from Conyers, Georgia. And my question is, how does someone fit all this information into a tiny computer chip?</s>RICK LOCKRIDGE, CNN TECHNOLOGY CORRESPONDENT: A computer chip, which is also called a microprocessor sometimes, or a central processing unit, or CPU, is typically a small, thin piece of silicon onto which millions of transistors have been etched. In some cases, as with the new Pentium IV chip, there are 42 million transistors on that 1x1 inch piece of silicon. Now, this process can take dozens of steps and result in a chip that has up to 20 different layers. But those layers are very thin. And, again, they're made by chemical etchings and recoatings so that, over time, the very delicate circuits that must transmit little pulses of electricity in a very precise way are actually etched into the silicon wafer. For the past 35 years or so, the development of microchips has pretty much followed an axiom laid out by Gordon Moore, who said in 1965 that he predicted that chips would roughly double in capacity about every 18 months or so. And remarkably, that has held true through all this time. But now engineers are running up against the laws of physics and they can't get as much electricity to go where they want it to go in such a small space. So in the future, microchips might actually rely on small pulses of light to carry information in the form of ones and zeros instead of those little bitty pulses of electricity that do the job now.
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