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've gone from using 250 nm chips in the
mid-1990s to just 7 nm 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, 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 nanoribbons.
To find out more about these nanoribbons, we talked to our friend Jack Cavalleros 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 FinFET 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 nanoribbons 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 nanoribbons, 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 nanoribbons 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 3 fins with a capacity of 6x, a design that wasted space. However,
you can make a nanoribbon 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 going to 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
rye as much on cloud computing. I wonder how much better it might make our games as well,
assuming we can get nanoribbon GPUs from someone other than an eBay scalper when the time does come.
So thanks for watching guys, if you liked this video, hit like. If you subscribed to this video,
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for topics that we should cover in the future.