“We just need more creativity and a big dose of confidence.”
Look around, what do you find yourself with, or other people around you...gadgets, isn't it? Practically each & everybody is cling to some new tech devices and engrossed in the indefinite clocking of the time.
It's really interesting to see how semiconductors revolutionized an era and gifted humanity with the power of electronics. The sheer majesty of thousands of transistors attached in a single board, the numbers don't stop here, is mesmerizing.
Have you ever wondered what are those tracks doing in the motherboard, or how the processor's speed took a leap into GigaHertz and the fabrication into nanoworld. It is all crucially related to each other- the size, the speed, and the power.
There is this observation, that the number of transistors on a chip doubles roughly every two years. And this fact was given by Gordon Moore in the year 1965. Generally, because the size of the transistors is reducing on a scale.
Shrinking transistors, where will it take us…a few decades back we could have not imagined the road to go this long, even with the decreased sized transistors.
Had it not been for Chenming Hu, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, we wouldn't be having FinFETS.
The same FinFET which is the saviour of ongoing Moore’s Law, smooth and efficient as it had been. But how do the design and idea of the FinFET arouse in a mind?
We will take you back in history to the childhood of the “Father of FinFETS”, a child full of curiosity and challenge, doing chemical experiments and dismantling clocks in his house.
Doesn't all stories have an interesting child interested in building something bigger in the future, and it revolves around a basic idea.
How any electronic gadget is driven? The answer is Current. And it turns out that transistors manipulate the flow of electricity in computer chips, sending signals to make devices perform certain functions.
Every transistor has a source, a drain, a conductive channel that connects them, and a gate to control the flow of current down the channel.
But by the mid-1990s, with the average feature size around 350 nm, the prospects for being able to shrink transistors further had invigorated a fury of worry as it was in the state of saturation.
No one thought that after 100nm the Moore’s Law will be alive in the structures as the main problem was power. As features grew smaller, current that leaked through when a transistor was in its “off” state became a bigger issue.
This leakage is so great that it increased—or even dominated—a chip’s power consumption which is not desirable in any form of circuitry.
The whole world was racing against the odds to fit in the transistors, their solutions had involved thinning the gate’s oxide layer, which reduces the leakage current giving better control over the channel.
It was Hu, who could see the flaw in this smooth and simple transference of the electrons; that making the oxide layer sufficiently thin would allow the electrons to jump across it into the silicon substrate, forming yet another source of leakage. Back to where it started, so he could see a limit to this method.
For Hu, the fundamental problem as quite clear—making the channel very thin to prevent electrons from sneaking past the gate.
The other approaches were, involved making it harder for the charges to sneak around the gate. It was achieved by adding a layer of insulation buried in the silicon beneath the transistor. That design came to be called a fully depleted silicon-on-insulator, or FDSOI.
The other involved giving the gate greater control over the flow of the charge by extending the thin channel vertically above the substrate, like a shark’s fin, so that the gate could wrap around the channel on three sides instead of just sitting on top.
This structure was called as FinFET – named for a vertical fin-like component. It takes up less surface area than conventional two-dimensional transistors, allowing engineers to fit more on each chip.
After Hu's invention, companies like Intel have used FinFET to expand the boundaries of digital processing capabilities to smaller, more powerful devices.
Post FinFET's manufacturing, when they were revamping the industry, Hu was asked what did he do differently he had a very subtle reply “I think the difference was that we looked at it and said, we want to do this not because we want to write another paper or get another grant, but because we want to help the industry. We felt we had to keep [Moore’s Law] going.”
Look around, what do you find yourself with, or other people around you...gadgets, isn't it? Practically each & everybody is cling to some new tech devices and engrossed in the indefinite clocking of the time.
It's really interesting to see how semiconductors revolutionized an era and gifted humanity with the power of electronics. The sheer majesty of thousands of transistors attached in a single board, the numbers don't stop here, is mesmerizing.
Have you ever wondered what are those tracks doing in the motherboard, or how the processor's speed took a leap into GigaHertz and the fabrication into nanoworld. It is all crucially related to each other- the size, the speed, and the power.
There is this observation, that the number of transistors on a chip doubles roughly every two years. And this fact was given by Gordon Moore in the year 1965. Generally, because the size of the transistors is reducing on a scale.
Shrinking transistors, where will it take us…a few decades back we could have not imagined the road to go this long, even with the decreased sized transistors.
Had it not been for Chenming Hu, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, we wouldn't be having FinFETS.
The same FinFET which is the saviour of ongoing Moore’s Law, smooth and efficient as it had been. But how do the design and idea of the FinFET arouse in a mind?
We will take you back in history to the childhood of the “Father of FinFETS”, a child full of curiosity and challenge, doing chemical experiments and dismantling clocks in his house.
Doesn't all stories have an interesting child interested in building something bigger in the future, and it revolves around a basic idea.
How any electronic gadget is driven? The answer is Current. And it turns out that transistors manipulate the flow of electricity in computer chips, sending signals to make devices perform certain functions.
Every transistor has a source, a drain, a conductive channel that connects them, and a gate to control the flow of current down the channel.
But by the mid-1990s, with the average feature size around 350 nm, the prospects for being able to shrink transistors further had invigorated a fury of worry as it was in the state of saturation.
No one thought that after 100nm the Moore’s Law will be alive in the structures as the main problem was power. As features grew smaller, current that leaked through when a transistor was in its “off” state became a bigger issue.
This leakage is so great that it increased—or even dominated—a chip’s power consumption which is not desirable in any form of circuitry.
The whole world was racing against the odds to fit in the transistors, their solutions had involved thinning the gate’s oxide layer, which reduces the leakage current giving better control over the channel.
It was Hu, who could see the flaw in this smooth and simple transference of the electrons; that making the oxide layer sufficiently thin would allow the electrons to jump across it into the silicon substrate, forming yet another source of leakage. Back to where it started, so he could see a limit to this method.
For Hu, the fundamental problem as quite clear—making the channel very thin to prevent electrons from sneaking past the gate.
The other approaches were, involved making it harder for the charges to sneak around the gate. It was achieved by adding a layer of insulation buried in the silicon beneath the transistor. That design came to be called a fully depleted silicon-on-insulator, or FDSOI.
The other involved giving the gate greater control over the flow of the charge by extending the thin channel vertically above the substrate, like a shark’s fin, so that the gate could wrap around the channel on three sides instead of just sitting on top.
This structure was called as FinFET – named for a vertical fin-like component. It takes up less surface area than conventional two-dimensional transistors, allowing engineers to fit more on each chip.
After Hu's invention, companies like Intel have used FinFET to expand the boundaries of digital processing capabilities to smaller, more powerful devices.
Post FinFET's manufacturing, when they were revamping the industry, Hu was asked what did he do differently he had a very subtle reply “I think the difference was that we looked at it and said, we want to do this not because we want to write another paper or get another grant, but because we want to help the industry. We felt we had to keep [Moore’s Law] going.”
A smooth knowledgeable read. Kudos to the author!!
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