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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."
I love it. The date on the press release says - January 11, 2002.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
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.
I work for an IBM owned company, luckily we've been sheltered from most of the bad things (at least where I'm at)
What really helps when working for a large company like IBM, is DONT BECOME A NUMBER. Make sure that you are in a position where customers have to frequently refer to you by "name" and not by position. It also helps if your name becomes almost a cliche' for a particular action or service.
When the time comes, the numbers will get laid off, the engineer clients know by name won't.
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.
Actually, the editor that you are chiding has a valid point in my opinion. Leakage is headed towards the point where it won't matter how many transistors you can pattern in lithography ino a given area if they leak so much that you can never be sure when they turned off. FinFET's are one technique to enable transistors to actually work as MOS transistors when the industry heads below 50nm process technologies. Without some solution to the leakage problem, Moore's law is in some danger of becoming invalid.