Chip building goes up!

Intel Increases Transistor Speed by Building Upward

(...) early transistors were built on a flat surface. But like a real estate developer building skyscrapers to get more rentable space from a plot of land, Intel is now building up.

The company has already begun making its microprocessors using a new 3-D transistor design, called a Finfet (for fin field-effect transistor), which is based around a remarkably small pillar, or fin, of silicon that rises above the surface of the chip.

(...) it expected to be able to make chips that run as much as 37 percent faster in low-voltage applications and it would be able to cut power consumption as much as 50 percent.

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