Two years ago I wrote this post about IBM's announcement of "7 nm transistors", and it still gets many pageviews every week. So, what's been going on since then?
I encourage you to read this article from Semiconductor Engineering - it's a nice, in-depth look at what the major manufacturers are doing to get very small transistors actually to market. It also explains what those numerical designations of size really mean, and changes in lithography technology. (This is one part of my book that I really will have to revise at some point.)
Likewise, here is a nice article about IBM's latest announcement of "5 nm" transistors. The writing at Ars Technica on this topic is usually of high quality. The magic words that IBM is now using are "gate all around", which means designing the device geometry so that the gate electrode, the one that actually controls the conduction, affects the channel (where the current flows) from all sides. In old-school planar transistors, the gate only couples to the channel from one direction.
Later I will write a long, hopefully accessible article about transistors, as this year is the 70th anniversary of the Bell Labs invention that literally reshaped global technology.
3 comments:
My arithmetic skills are somewhat atrophied, but I believe that would be the 70th anniversary. We had a 50th anniversary celebration at Bell Labs in 1997, when some of the early innovators like integrated circuit inventor Jack Kilby were still alive.
Ahem. Fixed. (hangs head in coffee-deprived shame.)
Wonder if Walter Brown will be available for the 70th anniversary? He had some good stories for the 50th.
Post a Comment