Double-Gate Transistors

democritus writes "Scientific American is reporting that IBM has made a new double-gate transistor" As transistors become shorter, current bleeds through them when they are supposed to be off. The new design should enable anything down to 25 nm long transistors. Currently transistors are 250 nm long, but to attain higher speeds, circuit designers often use fatter transistors which can drive a wire to a high or low state (binary 1 and 0) faster (hence very hot CPUs). The new design acts as if it doubled the length of the transistor, enabling higher speed circuits in the same area. Finally, because each transistor has two gates, a chip using the new transitor could use either both gates (for fast operation) or a single gate (to save power for portable applications).