if you're a pc enthusiast you probably know that the main way that our pcs our
phones and our consoles have gotten faster over the years is through
shrinking transistor sizes on our processors
indeed we have gone from using 250 nanometer chips in the mid-1990s to just
seven nanometer models today and that number is expected to keep shrinking but
this was not achieved simply by taking the exact same transistor design and
shrinking it every couple of years instead engineers have had to get
creative with how to build transistors in order to pull this off as we touched
on in our video about processor nodes which you can check out up here one
major innovation was finfet this is a type of transistor in which the channel
the electrons move through is raised up off the substrate and like a shark's fin
increasing the surface area and allowing more electrons to flow but now we're
getting to the point where finfet is reaching its limits in terms of how
tightly we can pack the transistors together which means the industry is going to
need to move to a new transistor design for future generations of high
performance chips enter gate all around a super boring name for
a super cool update to the finfet concept similar to finfet the channel is
raised up off the substrate but instead of being one large fin-like piece it's
broken up into several pieces called nano ribbons to find out more about
these nano ribbons we talked to our friend jack cavallaros at Intel and we'd
like to thank him along with bruce feinberg marissa ahmed and ben benson
for helping us with this episode so gate all-around design increases the surface
area so that the gate that controls the current flow surrounds the nanoribbon on
all sides hence the name gate all around this is hugely important for a few
reasons actually you see the gate's ability to control current depends on
the physical size of the channel and a single bulky fin can be hard to control
at present transistor sizes it's not a huge problem but if we kept shrinking
transistors even further the lack of control would introduce leakage which
would interfere with and possibly corrupt your data flow but with gate all
around the smaller nano ribbons means the gate has a much easier time
controlling the current flow allowing for more tightly packed transistors on
top of that you can stack the nano ribbons see what we did there which
takes up less space than adding more fins in finfet which required you to put
the fins next to each other instead another big advantage is that if a
certain processor design requires more power you can simply make the nano
ribbons wider laterally with finfet each fin could carry a discrete amount of
current so if a design needed say 5x current but each finfet could only carry
2x you'd have to have three fins with a capacity of 6x a design that wasted
space however you can make a nano ribbon just as wide as you need saving valuable
room on the transistor and the best part is that you don't need super exotic
materials in order to pull this off it can be done with a silicon germium alloy
which is way more basic than it sounds meaning that it shouldn't be too
difficult for large chip makers to produce gate all around chips in bulk on
that subject when should we see gate all-around transistors hitting the
market well it should be within the next five years across all vendors but it'll
probably appear in data center and server applications before it trickles
down to consumers like you and me but once it does we're gonna see the
expected benefits that we're used to with smaller transistors like faster
computing better battery life lower power consumption and an ability for
devices like laptops and phones to better handle tasks without having to
rely as much on cloud computing i wonder how much better it might make our games
as well assuming we can get nano ribbon gpus from someone other than an ebay
scalper when the time does come big thanks to
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