FinFET and Other Techniques – Keeping the Ball Rolling
by
Charlie Bess
Earlier this week Jeff Wacker (another Fellow) and I were having a discussion about the end of Moore’s Law and what’s being done to extend it as well as the effect of IT. It appears that a decade from now the transistor will look like a distant relative of the ones used today. There are a number of new techniques coming on line now that we’ll soon see the benefits.
The current materials and techniques are just allowing too much current leakage, increasing power consumption without improving capabilities. New techniques like FinFET allows the transistor to be oriented vertically and new more insular (higher k) materials are also helping to reduce the waste.
With the focus on Green computing, you can expect a big push to replace the lumbering big iron with a whole new lean and mean generation of devices. The computers will continue to change their designs, adding more cores and so the software (Operating System and applications) will need to change radically as well.
For those interested there is an entertaining History of the Transistor.
