The No. 1 computer-chip maker plans release details in the US on Monday about the transistors, which are just 30 nanometers - three-millionths of a centimtere - thick. It expects to sell 400 million-transistor processors able to do 400 million calculations in the time it takes to blink. Intel's first Pentium chip in 1993 had 3.1 million transistors, and the new Pentium 4 has 42 million.

The achievement will make it possible to build chips running 10 billion operations a second in 2005; today's best Pentium 4 runs 1.5 billion, Intel said. The greater power isn't needed for word-processing and data-entry work, though it could enable devices such as a handheld language translator that would allow an English-speaking tourist in France to talk with a French-speaking shop owner in real time, the company said.

``We're getting very close to the limit with thickness,'' said Richard Doherty, research director at Envisioneering Group, a technology-assessment and market research firm in Seaford, New York.

A stack of more than 100,000 of the 30-nanometer transistors, which act as switches to control the flow of electricity in a chip, would equal the thickness of a sheet of paper, said Tom Beermann, a spokesman for Santa Clara, California-based Intel. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.

The transistors, built using today's manufacturing tools, materials and processes, show that the traditional chip industry has a lot of life left, analysts said.

``This is proving there's no reason the normal growth of the semiconductor industry can't continue on for probably another 10 years,'' said Jim Handy, an analyst at Dataquest Inc.