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if you're a pc enthusiast you probably know that the main way that our pcs our

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phones and our consoles have gotten faster over the years is through

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shrinking transistor sizes on our processors

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indeed we have gone from using 250 nanometer chips in the mid-1990s to just

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seven nanometer models today and that number is expected to keep shrinking but

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this was not achieved simply by taking the exact same transistor design and

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shrinking it every couple of years instead engineers have had to get

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creative with how to build transistors in order to pull this off as we touched

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on in our video about processor nodes which you can check out up here one

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major innovation was finfet this is a type of transistor in which the channel

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the electrons move through is raised up off the substrate and like a shark's fin

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increasing the surface area and allowing more electrons to flow but now we're

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getting to the point where finfet is reaching its limits in terms of how

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tightly we can pack the transistors together which means the industry is going to

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need to move to a new transistor design for future generations of high

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performance chips enter gate all around a super boring name for

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a super cool update to the finfet concept similar to finfet the channel is

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raised up off the substrate but instead of being one large fin-like piece it's

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broken up into several pieces called nano ribbons to find out more about

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these nano ribbons we talked to our friend jack cavallaros at Intel and we'd

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like to thank him along with bruce feinberg marissa ahmed and ben benson

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for helping us with this episode so gate all-around design increases the surface

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area so that the gate that controls the current flow surrounds the nanoribbon on

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all sides hence the name gate all around this is hugely important for a few

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reasons actually you see the gate's ability to control current depends on

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the physical size of the channel and a single bulky fin can be hard to control

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at present transistor sizes it's not a huge problem but if we kept shrinking

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transistors even further the lack of control would introduce leakage which

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would interfere with and possibly corrupt your data flow but with gate all

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around the smaller nano ribbons means the gate has a much easier time

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controlling the current flow allowing for more tightly packed transistors on

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top of that you can stack the nano ribbons see what we did there which

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takes up less space than adding more fins in finfet which required you to put

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the fins next to each other instead another big advantage is that if a

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certain processor design requires more power you can simply make the nano

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ribbons wider laterally with finfet each fin could carry a discrete amount of

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current so if a design needed say 5x current but each finfet could only carry

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2x you'd have to have three fins with a capacity of 6x a design that wasted

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space however you can make a nano ribbon just as wide as you need saving valuable

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room on the transistor and the best part is that you don't need super exotic

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materials in order to pull this off it can be done with a silicon germium alloy

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which is way more basic than it sounds meaning that it shouldn't be too

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difficult for large chip makers to produce gate all around chips in bulk on

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that subject when should we see gate all-around transistors hitting the

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market well it should be within the next five years across all vendors but it'll

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probably appear in data center and server applications before it trickles

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down to consumers like you and me but once it does we're gonna see the

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expected benefits that we're used to with smaller transistors like faster

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computing better battery life lower power consumption and an ability for

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devices like laptops and phones to better handle tasks without having to

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rely as much on cloud computing i wonder how much better it might make our games

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as well assuming we can get nano ribbon gpus from someone other than an ebay

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scalper when the time does come big thanks to

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wren for sponsoring this video rent is a website where you calculate your carbon

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today so thanks for watching guys if you like this video hit like if you

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