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18 nanometer transistor

Posted by Nathan on from the Smaller-Faster-Better dept.

chrisr was the first of many to tell us that less than a week after the BBC reported Bell Labs had developed a 50 nanometer transistor, researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have announced an 18 nanometer transistor. Best of all, the team has decided to not patent the design, hoping it will lead to faster acceptance.

8 of 76 comments (clear)

  1. Guess what by CFN · · Score: 3

    I can wait to wire a couple of these transistors together an hook up a Beowulf cluster on them.

    Hey, do you think we can port linux to one of them(to a single transistor)?

    Windows sux! I hope Bill Gates doesn't try to force us to upgrade to these new transistors so we can run Windows 2k.

    Do you think the NSA can use these transistors to monitor our emails? BOMB, NUCLEAR, IRAQ, CHINA, ALLAH.

    What did I leave out?

  2. Are Patents Obsolete? by Baldrson · · Score: 3
    "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."

    When guys are patenting obvious, or worse, prior art like "multimedia transmitted over the internet" and actually getting people to pay up, while other guys are increasing the cost-effectiveness of the information infrastructure by, oh, lets say a factor of 10, and can't receive substantial returns in support their talent for future risk-taking innovation -- the patent of invention has gone the way of the patent of nobility: It is obsolete.

    What made the patent of nobility obsolete was the corruption of the nobility by politics. What, apparently, has made the patent of invention obsolete is the corruption of invention by legalistics.

    We still need nobility. In technological civilization, nobility is in the creative act. The problem is the politicians and lawyers have demonstrated they are, as a cultural phenomenon, hostile to true nobility.

    The creative act deserves the respect, reward and protection traditionally reserved for nobles.

    Fortunately, creators, themselves, possess great power.

    --
    Seastead this.
    1. Re:Are Patents Obsolete? by coaxial · · Score: 2
      It looks like it's time lay the smack down on someone...

      When guys are patenting obvious, or worse, prior art like "multimedia transmitted over the internet" and actually getting people to pay up, while other guys are increasing the cost-effectiveness of the information infrastructure by, oh, lets say a factor of 10, and can't receive substantial returns in support their talent for future risk-taking innovation -- the patent of invention has gone the way of the patent of nobility: It is obsolete.

      Is the patent system abused? Yes. Obsolete? Hell no.

      What, apparently, has made the patent of invention obsolete is the corruption of invention by legalistics.

      The problem with is that the threshold for granting them is pathetically low. (See this patent on refrigerator magnets.) Add a Patent Office that doesn't/can't do nearly the research that should be done to determine prior art. Throw in a culture of litigation and fear of litigation; and you have a situation ripe for abuse.

      This situation can be corrected removing any of those conditions (However correcting a culture tends to to be alot harder than correcting the others.)

      1. Increase the budget to the Patent Office, so they can actually do research and determine if something is prior art.
      2. Make it easier for the patent office to declare unpatentable concepts (i.e. Cardboard glued to a magnet. Gee, didn't I make one of those back in grade school?)
      3. Have people actually challenge patents for once. No company will because they're afraid someone will come after they're dubious patents. A public action group would be ideal for this.


      In technological civilization, nobility is in the creative act. The problem is the politicians and lawyers have demonstrated they are, as a cultural phenomenon, hostile to true nobility.

      Mmmmm no. It's simple "Buisness is War". Who are the warriors in buisness? No, not the engineers and scientists, but rather lawyers. You create what you can and you hinder your competition <Malcom X> by any means necessary </Malcom X>. Hostile take over. Lawsuits. HR Raids. Patents. It's all the same.

      The creative act deserves the respect, reward and protection traditionally reserved for nobles.

      Yes creativity deserves resepect. Yes it deserves protection. Guess what? There's already a mechanism to protect products of creativity. It's called "patents".

      Nobels on the other hand deserve nothing since all they did to get their title was be born. Those that spout Divine-Right and Divine-Right-eque beliefs are either damn liars or damn fools. (However this does not mean you should go and spit in the face of Queen Elizabeth II or call her "Liz", her title deserves respect. However can lobby for the abolishion of the very monarchy she heads.)

      Fortunately, creators, themselves, possess great power.

      Wait. Did I miss something? Previously you said that the transistor inventors "can't receive substantial returns in support their talent for future risk-taking innovation" but now you say they have "great power" which is it? If you don't have the abiltiy to follow through with your invention what good is it?

    2. Re:Are Patents Obsolete? by the+eric+conspiracy · · Score: 2

      The problem with is that the threshold for granting them is pathetically low. (See this patent on refrigerator magnets.)

      While I agree with your premise that the threshold for patents is too low in the US (I like the European Patent Office criterea better), one has to wonder whether the particular invention you cited is in fact a good example of something that does not deserve a patent. It seems to me that having a magnetic sheet with attached perforated tags which could be printed with various forms of advertising is in fact a fairly useful idea, and one I haven't seen in use, either.

      I have seen a lot of ideas that may look trivial actually turn up to be EXTREMELY valuable. The Post-It, for example. What is that except a piece of paper with some glue on it? Is that, on the face of it, any different in simplicity than a refrigerator magnet with fly strips? Yet it has been worth hundreds of millions of dollars to 3M and is generally considered to be one of the most innovating approaches to using a product (a weak glue) in an unexpected way that has come along in recent memory.

      The fact of it is that the BEST ideas are simple - the ones that you look at and say 'why didn't I think of that!', not the complex Rube Goldbergs that we are all too often saddled with in our technological society.

  3. US centric again by Betcour · · Score: 3

    Actually I reported that a French team made some 20 nanometers transistors a month ago but of course it didn't make it on Slashdot, as of course only the US can make innovations, and anything else doesn't exist.

  4. 100 atoms long... by Deosyne · · Score: 2

    And in the press release, they indicated that they are looking to reduce the size to one-half of what is is now; and it wasn't in that, "You know, someday we might..." way, it was like a simple statement of fact. Jesus, a 9 nanometer transistor may actually be possible soon; could we actually see working nanotechnology within the next 20 years? Despite the vast number of technological advances that have occured over the past 100 years, the prospect of working nanotech just seems too... William Gibson, if you will. :) Like the man said in The Matrix, "This is a very exciting time!". :)

    Deosyne

  5. Actual fab technology by reaper · · Score: 2

    So can anyone answer a couple of questions?

    It looks like these suckers will require a couple of poly layers to get the gate to wrap around the channel... will that require any type of mass changes to the fab process (besides going to, oh, I don't know, the x-ray band for the masking)

    Since the channel is about 18nm wide, these babies will have a (reletively) massive amount of resitance, as oppsed to the Bell Labs design which has a small gate, but a fairly large channel. Will this effect the charging of the next few gates down the line from them because...

    ... the gates seem to be rather large, and pretty full of poly. Will they have larger gate capacitances, and require more current to switch at the same speed?

    In a nutshell, would someone use these devices in high-performance applications, or would they only be suitable for getting better density on a chip? Oh ya, my knowledge of VLSI sucks, so please be kind with flames.

    --
    - Dan
  6. I have an idea for really small transistors ! :-) by renoX · · Score: 2

    As I understand, the 50 nm transistor was created with a vertical channel, and the 18 nm transistor was created with a gate with a special shape (a fork) in order to pinch more effectively the electron stream, (if I made some mistake feel free to correct me).

    How about a transistor which combines both technologies ? :-)