Intel senior fellow Mark Bohr showed off the company’s revolutionary new 3D transistors in an announcement this week in San Francisco. The power, performance, and real estate gains are impressive. Moore’s Law seems to be holding.
In the video below, Bohr explains that these transistors are normally built in a two-dimensional fashion, where electrons flow from one end of a transistor to another in a planar way. With the Tri-Gate transistors, they flow sideways, then up, then across and then down again. This allows the transistor to take up less space on a chip, the same way a skyscraper is a more efficient use of a plot of land.
The video is well done, fun, and worth watching.
From the press release:
Intel today announced a significant breakthrough in the evolution of the transistor, the microscopic building block of modern electronics. For the first time since the invention of silicon transistors over 50 years ago, transistors using a three-dimensional structure will be put into high-volume manufacturing. Intel will introduce a revolutionary 3-D transistor design called Tri-Gate, first disclosed by Intel in 2002, into high-volume manufacturing at the 22-nanometer (nm) node in an Intel chip codenamed Ivy Bridge. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. The 22nm 3-D Tri-Gate transistors provide up to 37 percent performance increase at low voltage versus Intel’s 32nm planar transistors. This incredible gain means that they are ideal for use in small handheld devices, which operate using less energy to “switch” back and forth. Alternatively, the new transistors consume less than half the power when at the same performance as 2-D planar transistors on 32nm chips.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
God dang it! I just bought my Sandy Bridge! now I want an Ivy Bridge! Then ill want a Brick Bridge! arg! Tech needs to stop! i need to catch up!
Nice, yes … “game changer”, I think not
Obviously in need of government regulation.
Meh.
Cute trick, but in reality there are already “3D” chips out there: present day technology involved designing chips so that they can hook up by putting the tops of 2 different chips together.
More importantly though, silicon real estate really isn’t an issue anymore. For several years now the cost of real estate was so low as to be largely irrelevant – only of issue for gigantic multinationals.
What is an issue, is power and heat.
The devices in question above are primarily necessary in order to advance process geometries at the 22 nanometer node or below – but really no one needs this.
E.M.Smith May 6, 2011 at 10:18 pm: Haven’t folks made 3-D transistors before? Things with a V shape?
I thought of that, too. The V-shape increased the surface area of the substrate but the transistor was still effectively planar in design. The Intel innovation seems to increase the gate area in relation to the rest of the device.
I don’t know why everyone is getting so excited…
The usefulness of computers was disproved a long time ago by V=dt/dt, this is all just crank science! By definition time can’t be it’s own evolution factor and therefor we can quite obviously conclude that computers are worthless and that anyone who disagrees is stupid!
Computer scientists of been putting out nonsense like this for decades and it has set our computer technology (which is all a lie) back several hundred years!
Curse you Babbage! And the rest of them too….Ada, Mauchly, Eckert, etc…
/sarc
Micron Technology announced a technology using Through Silicon Vias (TSV) to stack memory die. It increases bandwidth and power consumption.
http://www.micron.com/innovations/hmc.html
Motorola had been exploring fabricating 3D transistor structures from at least the early 70s. Intel has always been somewhat second rate, though in the last few years, they really have been breaking new ground in fabrication.
C. Shannon
May 7, 2011 at 12:22 pm
###
Claude,
You forgot your buddy Turing !
“E.M.Smith says:
May 6, 2011 at 10:18 pm
Haven’t folks made 3-D transistors before? Things with a V shape?
Oh, wait, they have:
http://www.patents.com/us-6078078.html
so this is more of a “we made it square instead of a V” announcement…
Um, I guess this is a marketing announcement?”
A patent a product does not make. In other words, many people make up patents that they have never made the devices of, usually in the hopes someone else makes the item and will be forced to pay them royalties. Show me where this is a factual product, and I will be more persuaded by your argument.
As others have pointed out, there have been a lot of 3D attempts through the years, from RCA chip and wire amplifier modules in 1959, to stacked layers of gates, using epi deposition at several companies in the late 1960s to AMD’s V structures. Intel’s approach is a bit different – it goes to 3 dimensions on the individual device to get more surface in the same 2 dimensional area, and more importantly, relative to previous attempts, it is in production. Wow!!!
For those who think Intel will hit the buffers over memory access you might find this interesting http://www.intel.com/technology/quickpath/introduction.pdf
This guy’s voice is so monotonous… so Bohring.
When I was in school (around 1980), I was introduced to the subject of how small can you go. At this time it was a major achievement to draw a nice graphic 500×500 in less than a minute. Being an optimist I was dreaming of the day when you could do graphics in real time and telling my friends about it. They would give me all the reasons why it would be impossible, a number involving quantum physics. They pooh poohed any idea that you could have storage or data busses that could handle that without a large building to handle it.
It is thirty years later and my dream is close to reality. You can play real time video games with 10 million other users with graphics, if you have a nicer computer than mine, that update at up to 40 or more frames per second in three dimensions. They still have a ways to go before getting those graphics to look like they are in the real world, but wow have they made progress in those thirty years.
I also don’t care if this video is just a marketing release. Some advertisements ARE exciting even if they have a commercial bent to them. There are no government regulations requiring Intel or any other company to progress. They know that if they build it, we will come, and bring with us lots of green stuff to pay for it. AMD will now push harder to outdo Intel.
The problem with the people in 1980 who were pessimistic was they didn’t know what they didn’t know, just as today there are people with that particular mindset. And even if something can’t be done, failures in trying will lead to useful information. Rather than say something can’t be done, I think its better to say “try it” and see what happens.