Perhaps the most far-reaching technological achievement of the past 50 years has been the steady march toward smaller transistors, bringing them closer together and reducing their power consumption. However, ever since I started my career at Intel more than 20 years ago, we’ve been hearing the alarm that the transistor’s descent to infinitesimal is coming to an end. Yet year after year, brilliant new innovations continue to drive the semiconductor industry further.
Along the way, our engineers had to change the architecture of the transistors so that we could continue to shrink area and power consumption while increasing chip performance. This is what drove us to replace the “planar” transistor designs that were popular in the second half of the 20th century with 3D fins in the first half of the 2010s. Now, FinFETs also have an end date, and a new all-around (GAA) structure will soon be in production.