SAN FRANCISCO — For decades, the tech industry has relied on the ability of semiconductor companies to wring more power out of computer chips, making the smartphones that fit in a hand today more capable than the computers that filled entire rooms 40 years ago.

While some experts worry that era of increased miniaturization is ending, IBM is saying not so fast.

The company released details Thursday of its next advance in chip manufacturing technology, which it says could keep that innovation going for another 10 years.

Using a novel approach to making smaller transistors that act as tiny switches in microprocessors and other chips, IBM said, the new production process can squeeze nearly twice as many transistors on a fingernail-size chip as the last technology it introduced in 2021. That will offer 50% greater computing performance and 70% better energy efficiency, the company said.

“Everyone demands more performance, but no one wants to pay for the power,” Huiming Bu, an IBM vice president who leads chip research and development, said.

IBM, though a pioneer in semiconductors, doesn’t make or sell chips anymore. But its engineers still develop new technology for turning silicon wafers into chips, which it typically licenses to manufacturers.

Industry analysts briefed on the IBM announcement were impressed, while noting that the approach would face competition.

Miniaturization gains are frequently described in nanometers, or billionths of a meter, though that nomenclature is now less a precise measurement than a marketing term to distinguish technology generations.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., for example, is making chips rated at roughly 2 nanometers. Intel has a comparable technology described as 1.8 nanometers.

IBM described its new production process as 0.7 nanometers, the first to break the 1-nanometer threshold. The underlying innovation, which IBM first described a year ago, is what the company calls a “nanostack” transistor.

It is the latest example of building transistors from three-dimensional structures — akin to tiny skyscrapers, rising from the surface of the chip — rather than simply shrinking transistors in lateral directions.

“It is a sign that we are not going to run out of gas like we always think we are,” Patrick Moorhead, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, said.