SYNOPSIS
3-D TRANSISTOR
SUBMITTED TO:Ms. JETINDER SINGH
SUBMITTED BY:PARAS GAMBHIR UE105062 ECE-B2(7TH SEM)
3-D TRANSISTOR
Tri-gate or 3-D Transistor fabrication is used by Intel Corporation for the nonplanar transistor architecture used in Ivy Bridge Processors. These transistors employ a single gate stacked on top of two vertical gates allowing for essentially three times the surface area for electron to travel. Intel reports that their trigate transistors reduce leakage and consume far less power than current transistors. This allows up to 37% higher speed, or a power consumption at under 50% of the previous type of transistors used by Intel. Intel states that "The additional control enables the transistor to switch very quickly between the two states. Intel has stated that all products after Sandy Bridge will be based upon this 3D design.
History
Intel was the first company to announce this technology. In September 2002, Intel announced their creation of 'Triple-Gate Transistors' . A year later in September 2003, AMD announced it was working on similar technology at the International Conference on Solid State Devices and Materials. No further announcements of this technology were made until Intel's announcement in May 2011 although it was stated at IDF 2011, that they demonstrated a working SRAM chip based on this technology at IDF 2009. On April 23, 2012 Intel released a new line of CPUs, termed Ivy Bridge, which feature tri-gate transistors. Intel has been working on its tri-gate architecture since 2002, but it took until 2011 to work out mass production issues. The new style of transistor was described on May 4, 2011, in San Francisco. Intel factories are expected to make upgrades over 2011 and 2012 to be able to manufacture the Ivy Bridge CPUs. As well as being used in Intel's Ivy Bridge chips for desktop PCs, the new transistors will also be used in Intel's Atom chips for low powered devices. TECHNOLOGY Ivy Bridge will use 22-nanometer technology versus the 32-nanometer technology currently used on Sandy Bridge. Moving to a smaller geometries generally results in faster, more power efficient processors. Its necessary to sustain Moores Law- -doubling the number of transistor on a silicon device every two years. As device dimensions become prohibitively small, cramming in transistors in the traditional two-dimensional fashion becomes impossible. So, 3D or vertical transistors become necessary.
CONCLUSION 3-D Transistor has improved switching speeds. This will allow to finally hit or exceed that magical 4GHz barrier in a CPU. Better performance at a small scale will allow more compact and effective devices to be produced in the coming future. Intels biggest challenge going forward isnt speed but power efficiency. The 3D transistors enable chips to operate at lower voltage with lower leakage, providing both improved performance and energy efficiency compared to previous Intels chips.
