Berkeley engineers boost chip capacity

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26 Jan 2000 News

Scientists claim to have developed a new semiconductor transistor so small that a single computer chip can hold 400 times more of the devices than before. This could have radical implications in faster and cheaper chip technology.

Chenming Hu, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley in charge of the project, said the prototype was a new world record. Dubbed 'FinFET', details of the invention, which was funded by the US Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, were unveiled at the International Electronic Devices Meeting in Washington.

The breakthrough changed the design of the 'gate', on the transistor which controls the flow of electric current. While previously this gate was a flat conductor controlled only one side of the passage through which the current flows, the Berkeley team redesigned it as a fork-shaped prong straddling both sides of the passage. This gives much better control and reduced current leakage, meaning the transistor can be made much smaller, said the group.

The FinFET's gate is 18 nm long, (about the width of 100 atoms). According to Hu it was already about 10 times shorter than the standard semiconductor transistor now used by the industry. They hope to even reduce the FinFET's length by another half in future.

Hu said the FinFET prototype was successfully fabricated last July and appeared to perform well. He said no patent had been taken out on the device. The reason for this is that they want the widest possible usage and hope it would become a mainstream transistor structure in the future.

See www-device.EECS. Berkeley.EDU/new.html

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Berkeley engineers boost chip capacity

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