Transistors go 3D as Intel re-invents the microchip

At an event today in San Francisco, Intel announced one of the most important pieces of semiconductor news in many years: the company's upcoming 22nm processors will feature a fundamental change to the design of the most basic building block of every computer chip, the transistor.

Intel has been exploring the new transistor for over a decade, and the company first announced a significant breakthrough with the design in 2002. A trickle of announcements followed over the years, as the new transistor progressed from being one possible direction among many to its newly crowned status as the official future of Intel's entire product line.

In this short article, I'll give my best stab at explaining what Intel has announced—the so-called tri-gate transistor. Semiconductor physics are not my strong suit, so corrections/clarifications/comments are welcome. Also, this explanation focuses solely on the "3D" part of today's announcements. Other features of the 22nm process, like high-K dielectrics and such, are ignored. (So if you see a funny term on a slide and you don't know what it means, either ignore it or hit one of the Related Links for more info.)

But before we dive into what's new about Intel's transistor design, we first have to review how traditional transistors work....

An interesting read. I wonder how this affects the end of the CMOS production - which can only scale so far. 32nm is already here (boy, I remember talking about the amazing new 65nm & 45nm architectures on these boards!), 22nm is to be released soon at a cinema near you. That leaves on 16nm, which I am told is planned for Haswell's shrink - Rockwell, and then the unnamed 11nm architecture. At that point, quantum tunneling takes hold. It will be interesting to see how the engineers develop cunning ways of avoiding the subatomic mess that is to come...

And where to from that? Nanoelectrics? Individual positioning of atoms to make femto-size transistors? Silicon has a width of roughly half a nanometre - where to from there?

Some futuristic technology that harnesses the quarks in atoms to produce strange and curious atom-like objects at an even smaller scale???

And - I know, I know... The heart of a computer is the GPU now - the CPU does nothing, but it is always good to look back at the good old times and chat. :)

P.S. For those that are about to bite my head off about the above paragraph, it's a joke - yes, I know the CPU still has relevance in today's computers. ;)
Also - I was told I should pop in and post for once, as a friend here told me I was missed (?). So here we are.

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- Luke.

Transistors go 3D as Intel re-invents the microchip

Good article there, thanks. (Fixed the link.)

The good and clever bit is in the (extreme) photolithography to fabricate the 3d gate fin. The tricks used to fabricate the 3d structures for memory devices may well have helped there. The next clever bit is to get all the materials expansion/contraction/strain right so that it then all doesn't crack up during the fab processing or even when in use.


Hopefully, quantum computing will be here before the present 'bulk scale' computing tech hits the single atomic layer limit to halt further progress.

There's also an interesting aside for perhaps utilising monoatomic graphene circuitry... However, going quantum would offer a better jump...

Meanwhile, there is still the very badly neglected and underutilised world of going parallel...


All interesting stuff.

Happy fast cool crunchin',
Martin

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