![]() ![]() What is important is that this design isn’t just the next transistor for logic chips it might be the last. That transistor design goes by a variety of names-gate-all-around, multibridge channel, nanobeam-but in research circles we’ve been calling it the nanosheet. For the following node, 3 nm, which should begin limited manufacture around 2020, it is working on a completely new design. Samsung had some additional news: It has decided that the kind of transistor the industry had been using for nearly a decade has run its course. Right now, 7 nm is the cutting edge, but Samsung and TSMC announced in April that they were beginning the move to the next node, 5 nm. That name, a vestige of the early days of Moore’s Law, doesn’t have a clear physical meaning anymore, but it nevertheless reflects the degree to which features and devices on an integrated circuit are miniaturized. ![]() They are all manufacturing integrated circuits at the equivalent of what is called the 7-nanometer node. ![]() ( TSMC) are equipped to operate at this frontier of miniaturization. Only Intel, Samsung, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. You see, making smaller, better transistors for microprocessors is getting more and more difficult, not to mention fantastically expensive. That’s the premise behind Moore’s Law, even now that it’s (almost) at an end. So improving the performance and boosting the density of these transistors is the most straightforward way to make microprocessors-and the computers they power-work better. There are billions of them in a microprocessor today, and they are nearly all identical. The modern microprocessor is among the world’s most complex systems, but at its heart is a very simple, and we think beautiful, device: the transistor. The design reduces avenues for current to leak through and boosts the amount of current the device can drive. The Shape of Things to Come: Nanosheet field-effect transistors flow current through multiple stacks of silicon that are completely surrounded by the transistor gate.
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