From MercuryNews.com…

Today, HP scientists intend to announce they have created a new computer-chip design enabling an eightfold increase in the number of transistors on a chip, without making the transistors smaller.

The scientists said their advance would equal a leap of three generations of Moore’s Law, a prediction formulated in 1964 by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that forecast chip makers could double the number of transistors on a chip every couple of years.

“This is three generations of Moore’s Law, without having to do all the research and development to shrink the transistors,” said Stan Williams, a senior fellow at HP in Palo Alto. “If in some sense we can leapfrog three generations, that is something like five years of R&D. That is the potential of this breakthrough.”

The scientists have published their work in the current issue of Nanotechnology, a publication of the British Institute of Physics. Nanotechnology is the study and engineering of materials so tiny they are measured at the level of atoms…