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Fin-Fet Transistors on the Horizon
MORTAR_COMBAT! writes "According to this 9 September News.com article, IBM scientists have "manufactured a working static RAM chip out of so-called Fin-Fet transistors, which feature two gates, rather than a single one, for conducting electricity". What does this mean for us? 50 percent performance increases, due to increased throughput of electricity, and 50 percent less power usage, due to decreased electrical leakage. Longer battery life for laptops, lower power bills for server farms. Moore's law lives on. More pretty pictures here."
Well, this sort of let's the air out of HP's bubble from two stories down! :)
Now when I buy my new machine it'll be eventually outdated!
Damn you Moore and your laws!
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
Man oh man, the this throws a whole new wrench into the gigahertz wars. Amd and Intel lookout, IBM gonna be rolling out some 33 mhz processers that will whip both your collective asses and further confuse computer owners.
This is good news but I sense wierdness in the space time contiunuim with this announcement.
Puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Here's for more awesome AMD processors! My computer architecture class was discussing Moore's law and we all agreed that it was reaching a plateau in respect to the law itself. Looks like this is the breakthrough that will take processors to the next level.
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
What do you mean 50% less power? The pretty pictures at IBM say 20-25% less power.
Windows will have general protection faults twice as quickly.
(I'm sorry, I just had too...)
I love it. The date on the press release says - January 11, 2002.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Don't those things cause heart damage?
I would love to get more power out of my laptop battery!!! Sign me up IBM!
"Cloning" the existing gates was the plan all along (:
.. well, according to Jango anyway..
Ladies, form queue here -->
I would guess that the January date refers to when the information was first released within IBM. Corporations don't release this type of information before they have all the Intellectual Property stuff hammered out. ;)
Where the Music Matters
Is it me or does that term remind me of Phen-Phen which was hyped as a weight loss pill?
Fin Fet: reduces voltage leakage
Phen Phen: reduces fat (increases chances of death)
Olestra: increases leakage while reduces fat absorption
hmm....
I love those pictures! Who knew that that aqua thingey was called a "box" GENIUS!!! I remember IBM saying a year ago or more that Magnetic Ram was on the way, along with QDR memory...
-=Errors always defy logic.=-
Link
Is it really OK to let transistors use it? What kind of message are we sending to young, impressionable transistors? Or to older, fatter ones?
Wouldn't that mean nothing in terms of the speed at which they can be switched on and off? Wouldn't that also generate moer heat thatn normal CMOSFET chips?
"It's even worse if you're locked into a proprietary operating system." -http://www.wehavethewayout.com/scale.asp?rew=0
I though Moore's law related to transistors and cost, IBM could probably make some shit hot chips (and probably do) but there out-of-pocket for me and you (and possibly IBM for really shit ones!)
There are lots of things that could keep Moore's law going, like better cheeper fabs, a new cheaper way to produce single isomer? waffers, doping methods to prevent leackage which could increase density and reduce failures. as well as new transistior designs.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
An improvement in technology that makes computers FASTER? Who could have imagined THAT would ever happen?
Intel, though, can boast of research breakthroughs of its own, as well as far higher sales volumes.
Too many research breakthroughs to mention here, apparently. Also, how does sales volume figure into a discussion about a technological breakthrough? Wouldn't that be something like saying Unix is technically superior, but Windows outsells it. Oh wait, they say stuff like that all the time!
Despite the downturn in the PC industry, Intel remains the largest semiconductor manufacturer in the world.
The spin on that one is a little harder to spot, but it's there. Sales across the industry could increase or decrease without changing the relative market share of the various manufacturers, so why even mention it?
Because C|NET is owned partially by Intel, and is heavily biased towards both Intel and Microsoft. They never say anything positive about IBM or Motorola without getting in a quick mention about Intel, and they never say anything nice about Unix, Linux, or Mac OS X without a tip of the hat to Microsoft. It's kind of fun when you know what you are looking for.
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
That's the best SIG I've seen for ages, It took at least a couple of reads to 'fully' get the joke!
"There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand
binary and those who don't"
I understand trying to make it simpler, but why remove all information that's meaningful? They might as well say "here's an electromicrograph that looks like a tree, and here's a glossy diagram with some pretty boxes and arrows, but no actual information."
Harrumph!
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
Then, as far as I know IBM, that news must be about 10 years old.
Please, the world has enough "Gates" already ;-)
You could've lost it here in San Francisco.
I would think that the performance increase OR lower power usage would be the result... not both at once. If you take the performance increase, you need to use the same amount of power... or if you take the power savings, performance needs to stay the same.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
It was you who fucked him....
Oh I see what you mean about not a BIG deal....
An American company at the technological forefront. Why can't Yuropeen technology companies give to the world like the American companies have done for 100 years?
The Yuropeens have turned out to be more of a leech than the asians.
The first one is very good. It explains the problems with conventional scaling methods then presents the solution to the Gordian knot, the FinFet. Found by searching IBM chips (It is on my information resources list)
Maintaining the benefits of CMOS scaling when scaling bogs down
Process requirements for continued scaling of CMOS--the need and prospects for atomic-level manipulation
It's not quite a Melded Darlington, but it certainly reminds me of a Darlington pair.
A Darlington is two transistors tied together where emitter of one goes straight into the base of the other. This basically sharpens the gain, but you pay a price in speed. Nonetheless, Darlingtons are used, as well as Photo-Darlingtons.
I had just about forgotten everything about transitors from my EE days until I picked up robotics. Software really isoltated you from how things really work.
New transitor designs are a dime a dozen. For instance the tunnel diode. (A diode is the most basic semi-conductor, a transitor is basically two diodes.
Pick up electronics as a hobby. I urge you EE's out there that like me are writing business software. It's very rewarding.
Obviously right now this is much more expensive than SRAM because it's not being mass-produced. But let's face it, computers would be faster and cheaper (because of reduced circuitry from lack of refresh stuff) if we could use SRAM, but because it's so much more expensive than DRAM, we don't. My question is this: at the same size (capacity and size in micrometers) how much more/less will this cost than SRAM? Does the price become comparable to DRAM? if it is comparable to SRAM, we will definalty see improvements, but the majop improvements will come if it becomes near DRAM (even if a little more expensive) we could see drastic increases in performance. My 2 cents.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
And the diagram is fucking ugly to boot! Someone could use that as an advertisement against bitmaps and for vector-graphics editing tools.
The inversion layer forms on the sides of the fin and the conduction occurs along the fin. Actually, at these dimensions it is debatable that you may have volume inversion of the fin. The source/drain contacts occur at the ends of the fins. A top-down drawing/SEM would have helped.
Won't they get sued over that?
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Fin-Fet means Nice-Fat in Norwegian. You figure out the relevance to geeks.
Signed, Ex-troller for Looge.
curious.. anyone know what 'FIN' stands for? 'MOS' in MOS-Fet stands for Metal Oxide Semiconductor.. but FIN?
Aren't field effect transistors cool? I remember my first MOS-FET HT from Yaesu (http://www.yaesu.co.uk/amateur/vhf/index.htm) - promised and delivered on longer battery life.. can't wait to see the nextgen communications products using this technology....
-j
www.joryanick.com
Ok, now I understand. I was much confused by all the press writing "two gate" device. Every rational NAND/NOR gate made in a MOS process is made with 2 gates. A 4 input device would have 4 gates.
The big advantage of the FinFet device is rather than being an embedded surface device with the gate on top of the channel which is embedded in the substrate, the FinFet uses a channel elevated out of the substrate so the gate wraps three sides of the channel. The papers report access to the top and bottom of the channel as "two gates" it is really a three side wrapping of the source-drain channel which is raised out of the substrate.
The big advantage is that for a given gate voltage the penetration into the channel in blocking carriers is only so far. With the gate on both(3) sides of the channel the penetration effectiveness for a given voltage is greatly increased.
Actually the performance benefit from double-gate is minimal. The approximate delay associated with switching a capacitor is CV/I, where C is the capacitance of the gate, V is the source voltage, and I is the on current of the device. Double-gate gives you double (or slightly more) the current, at the expense of twice the capacitance. You don't really gain much at the same gate length. The real advantage is scaling. You can make shorter double-gate FETs, and gain the kind of performance you're used to from following Moore's "Law".
I'm feeling sad. If the future (2-5 years) means PC's are gone and all we will have are X-Box type boxen on the desktop, I'll cry. Faster RAM? What for? I don't care if I have 100GHZ and a Petabyte of nanosecond ram all in my pocket. If it becomes against the law to get a BASH shell running, I'll cry. Don't laugh, we are almost there. Getting a prompt on a palladium box might just become illegal (trying to cirvumvent the boxen with C:\ are ya? Go to jail then!) For the first time in my 26 years on this planet, I UNDERSTAND why old men go, "When I was a boy" and "Back in my day." I'm saying that allready, then you had to earn a spot on the boards and respect the sysop. Back in my day...
Enquiring minds want to know!
- From the post: "... and 50 percent less power usage."
- From the web site: "... new type of transistor which reduces power consumption by 20 - 25%."
Somewhere along the way, that thing got twice as efficient! Amazing design.Too big to fail? Does that make me to small to succeed?
Here's what people on Ma href="http://freshmeat.net/articles/view/553/">fre shmeat think about 11th september
Anyone know George Bush's email address so i can send him a link/cut and paste or Mp3(Can bush read?)?
...catchphrases.
Moore's Law involves the doubling of the NUMBER OF TRANSISTORS in an area (transistor density). If you have a single transistir acting as two, you're acting directly in contravention of Moore's Law. As soon as I had the gist of what was going on for this story i knew some idiot would say something about Moore's Law. Might as well have asked how powerful a Beowulf cluster of processors with these chips might be behind China's firewall while using Google to look for Natalie Portman's case mods.
- Chris
Mentioned in that story was that HP scientists are scrambling to publish anything they've been working on because people not putting out anything contributing to the bottom line in a year are going to get laid off.
I know that IBM just fired thousands of people and has a hiring freeze on their RAM research division (I have a friend that works there), besides letting a number of people go there.
I suspect the IBM scientists are in the same pickle as HP. When the economy goes down, the first thing to get axed is R&D, and they'd rather not be out on the street.
May we never see th
... scientists at IBM created a working prototype static RAM chip using Jango-Fett transistors. Consuming 4 times the power, it will store information with a cold air of dread and competence.
A secondary line of static RAM chips based on an exact genetic replica (called Boba-Fett transistors) will be developed throughout the year for mobile computing purposes. Support for the Dark Side is eminent.
You won't see much static RAM (SRAM) in a server farm. SRAM is what most call CMOS RAM (for most of the wrong reasons.) A server farm runs on Dynamic RAM (DRAM) but it's not where the power is chewed up. Disk drives and CPU's take the power, esp. the 10,000 and 15,000 RPM SCSI drives in use today.
The devices that will gain some power savings are those that we'll enjoy it most in; handheld toys!
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
Glad to know that all the money IBM received from the Nazi's in WWII is going to something worthwhile.
"due to increased throughput of electricity"??
Don't you mean lowered RdsON?
And dual gate FETs have been around for decades. Used as mixers.
oh fin-fet transistors, I thought for sure it said bobo fet transvestite.
of course, I'm the guy who spent a night trying to get laid in a warehouse....
rim-shot.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
AMD just today announced that they have created 10 nm double gate transistors. Here is the AMD announcement
Guess what? I got a fever! And the only prescription.. is more cowbell!
...someone will invent a Boba Fet.
I think that the story submitter has played a little too much WC3 (or maybe I have too?). That's my favorite soundbyte from WC3 too.. MORTAR COMBAT!
But the web site said it was twice as fast and the post only said 50% faster :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Is this too much different from the dual-gate FETs that have been available for decades?
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
... also in related recent news ...
IBM announced a new line of system processing units, dubbed the "personal computer". These amazing compact systems weigh only 53 lbs and clock in at 4.77 MhZ. This magic box puts more computing power at the fingertips of more hobbyists than ever before.
IBM expects further growth in the Personal Computer field. "We could see speeds around 8MhZ within a few short years", claims Dick Johnson, chief engineer of the computing division.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Good. It's about time, though 50% of current high-power CPUs may be too little too late. I know of at least one major embedded systems corporation in a panic, because modern CPUs consume way too much power for use in many embedded environments.
Slashdot. Vapor for nerds. Stuff that won't matter for years.
Not that I'm complaining about new breakthroughs, but it sure seems like the vapor:substance ratio is sucking eggs lately, at least on slashdot. When someone offers an actual working product for some reasonable cost, maybe then I'll get excited. Until then I'll just stuff this into the mental round file.
One probable reason that the industry is looking closely at finFETs is that the original invention of them at UC Berkeley was not patented originally. Note that there are several patents on fabrication methods for manufacturing them now, but the original invention was not patented.
From an article about the early work on this at Berkeley:
Hu said the FinFET prototype was successfully fabricated last July and appeared to perform well. He said no patent had been taken out on the device. "We made the decision not to patent," Hu said. "We want the widest possible usage. We hope this becomes a mainstream transistor structure in the future."
As a VLSI design engineer working in the industry, I can see that finFET's are becoming a serious technology contender in the 50nm process timeframe.
The "fin" in finFET is not an acronym. It refers to the shape of the device which resembles the fin of a fish or tailfin of an airplane. You need to look at the device cross-sectioned to see where the name comes from.
Definition from the Semiconductor Glossary.
The TEM picture is not too clear, but try this site at Intel for a picture. Search down for the term "finFET" near the bottom.
The SEM picture shows the "fins" being in the source and drain region. I always though the "fin" was the gate as shown in the TEM cross-sectional picture. In this picture, what I thought was the "fin" is kinda hard to see. It's above the thing labelled "si island" in figure 26. Perhaps I'm mistaken. Or perhaps the authors of the document at Intel are mistaken.
AMD creates worlds smallest double-gate transistor
AMD just announced today that they produced the worlds smallest FinFETs at 10 nanometers...was that on slashdot?
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
At lest in Swedish (and perhaps Norwegian nd Danish) the namn Fin-Fet means Fine-Fat.
"Wow! That's one fine fat transistor!"
and 50 percent less power usage, due to decreased electrical leakage. Longer battery life for laptops,
Battery life for laptops has always been 2 hours. It will always be 2 hours. This is the minimum we'll put up with, and thus we'll invariably find ways to suck up the power until it *is* two hours. Much like how we're so very willing to load bloatware on our computers until windows takes 5 minutes to load. Any more, and we'll think it's too long. Any less and we'll think there's room to spare.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Not to mention that the narrow end of the fin contacting the substrate decreases channel/substrate leakage. This is a VERY cute idea. It probably can get better density, too, as it gets developed further.
That is all.
my xbox once the OPEN SOURCE MOVEMENT gets LINUX ported over to it! woo woo!
Why is Moore's Law always referred to with a shrug, as if it's some amazing, consistent, unstoppable force? The results that are interpreted as "Moore's Law" exist purely through human effort. Surely Moore's Law can't actually be the law of maximum human ability to improve, can it? Surely people in high places at Intel are throttling the engineers back when they get ahead of themselves, and pouring on the cash when they get behind... Setting and meeting expectations is what matters most to the stock market, after all. Moore's Law is just a means to that end.
They do say that "Shortly, we will be releasing our BiCMOS SiGe technology...", which means that they will be able to manufacture bipolar transistors and MOS transistors on the same chip. In other words, you can't make a modern CPU with it now if you don't work for IBM, but you will be able to soon.
like magnetic ram, and all the other wiz-bang new techs in the news recently.
Question is, when is it going to be common? Nowadays, it seems even with standards, solid backing, things sometimes still don't take off.
And until they do, it's got nothing to do with us little people.
Somebodys been playing Warcraft 3 lately.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Herbal Fin-Fet.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
=^-^= especially when electrified!
Not to mention that the narrow end of the fin contacting the substrate decreases channel/substrate leakage. This is a VERY cute idea. It probably can get better density, too, as it gets developed further.
Now, with additional gate surface area, we'll have LOTS of gate leakage to look forward to!
Same problem, different place.
"breakthrough" my ass. Why do slashdotters think every research experiment is some marketable product that will revolutionize the industry?
Use your noodle for a change and stop shooting off a load at ever slashdot post. Just nod and go "Oh that's interesting." not "this is the breakthrough that will take processors to the next level." Idiot.