The next high-performance transistor [News]

Five years ago, Intel introduced today's high-performance transistor to the world. Dubbed the FinFET, the device takes its name from its appearance: The transistor's current-carrying channel sticks up vertically in the shape of a fin, and the gate that controls it drapes over the sides. The result is a much tighter control over the flow of current, which in modern microprocessors can fairly easily sneak across the transistor when it's supposed to be shut off. But well before the FinFET exploded onto the scene in 2011, engineers and device physicists had already been looking at the possibility of taking that transistor geometry to its logical conclusion, with a gate that completely surrounds the current- carrying channel. Shifting to such a "gate-all-around" geometry would, in theory, allow chip companies to produce shorter transistors that don't leak copious amounts of current, improving speed or power consumption in the process.