IBM announced on Thursday that it had made a working version of a computer chip designed with a breakthrough architecture at the scale of 7nm, about twice as small as the current generation.

Though it will be a few years before the 7nm chips are more than a test case, the announcement breathes fresh optimism into an industry that has struggled recently to keep pace with the historical trend of semiconductors doubling their transistor density relative to cost every two years. The most advanced chips available on the market, like Intel's latest Broadwell chips and the processors used in Samsung's latest Galaxy S6 devices, generally run 14nm architecture.

The breakthrough comes from the New York Hudson Valley, where IBM has partnered with the state, Samsung, and other technology companies in an effort to create the next generation of computer chips. The new advance suggests semiconductors will continue to shrink, thus boosting capacity relative to size, until at least 2018.

As the The New York Times noted, Intel, the industry's leader in chip technology, has run into technical challenges manufacturing chips below the 14nm level, leading to concerns among technologists about how long Moore's Law can continue as a guiding principle for computerized electronics.  Moore's Law is an axiom generally accepted in the computer industry as a roadmap for future advances in computer processing power relative to price performance.

First put forward by Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore in 1965, the "law" refers to the observation that the number of components in an integrated circuit doubled every year. It's since been revised to refer to microprocessor speed relative to price, and has continued to hold true as about every 18 months to two years, new chips are engineered with exponentially more transistors and greater speed.

In general terms, it's why the iPhone 5 packs at least 35 times the processing power of the Cray-2, the world's fastest (room-sized) supercomputer until 1990. 

But as computer chips have hit the 14nm level, some concerns have been raised about how dense chips can physically get, especially given the practical difficulties in mass manufacturing at such a small scale. To give you an example, 10nm is about the thickness of the cell walls of some bacteria. The latest breakthrough, 7nm, is more or less one-tenth the size of a typical virus.

The latest breakthrough will at least add a few years onto Moore's Law, as well as expand the capacity of computer chips to about four times as much processing power as today's most powerful chips.

While IBM refused a guess to The New York Times on when the 7nm generation might officially feasible for mass manufacturing, it did share how it managed to half the thickness (and double the density) of the most advanced semiconductors so far created.

IBM used extreme ultraviolet light (EUV) to etch circuits into a base made of silicon-germanium (instead of the typical pure silicon material, which gave northern California's booming tech valley its distinctive name). While the precision required at this level is tricky for mass manufacturing, to say the least, IBM is confident about the next few years of chip-making.

"EUV is another game changer," VP of IBM's semiconductor research Mukesh Khare said. The next goal, and perhaps the final one for the current standard manufacturing process, is to reduce circuit area by another 50 percent over the 10nm standard that will be hitting the technology market next year.