Vanishing Transistor

The article “The Amazing Vanishing Transistor Act” found in the IEEE Spectrum discusses some of the new technologies that can be implemented for the transistor to increase its performance. Reducing its size can make the channel distance decrease causing the charge carries to have a shorter distance to travel. However, when reducing the size of the channel the gate has a harder time turning the channel off due to the lower threshold voltage that allows …

…threshold voltages and ruin the transistor. Leakage current is also reduced since there is no path for the carriers when the device is off. Many of these new transistor design techniques should take place within the next decade, depending on the application. For high power uses (i.e. microprocessors) planar CMOS will be used for much longer than more low power devices which should switch to double-gate devices since the leakage current is significantly less.