Intel, the world's largest semiconductor maker, has developed what it says is the fastest and smallest transistor. The breakthrough means that Moore's Law, which stipulates that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years, will remain on the books until at least 2007. Intel was scheduled to announce the development on Sunday at the Silicon Nanoelectronics Workshop in Kyoto, Japan. In its research labs in Hillsboro, Oregon, Intel engineers have designed and manufactured a handful of transistors that are only 20 nanometers, or 0.02 microns, in size. By comparison, the transistors found in the latest chips in use today measure 0.18 microns from one side of the transistor gate to the other. The implications of developing such small and fast transistors are significant: Silicon will be able to be used to make chips until 2007, and it will make possible microprocessors containing close to 1 billion transistors running at 20 gigahertz by that year. Today's Pentium 4 processors have about 42 million transistors and run at 1.7 gigahertz.