Video Animation: Mark Bohr Gets Small: 22nm Explained | Intel

hello I'm mark borer a senior fellow here at Intel most people know Intel as a manufacturer of microprocessor chips but they may not know is that each and every modern microprocessor is made up of millions or even billions of tiny electrical components called transistors over time transistors have been getting smaller and smaller in accordance with Moore's law because of this computing and communication devices continue to get smarter faster and more efficient keeping up with Moore's law has never been exactly easy for 22 nanometers it became clear early on that continued shrinking was not going to give us the benefits we have come to expect without some radical redesign I'm proud to say after a decade of research we've invented the solution for the first time in history the transistor has officially entered the third dimension what exactly does a 3d transistor look like well I'd love to show you and in fact there are more than a billion transistors on this single chip unfortunately they are far too small to be seen with the naked eye which means there's only one way to do this mr. director I'm ready for my close-up okay so now I'm 20,000 times smaller and just to give you some point of reference this huge object off to my right that's the chip I just dropped and this large unidentifiable object off to my left that's a human hair approximately 100,000 nanometers in diameter believe it or not I'm still far too large compared to a 22 nanometer transistor to give you a meaningful demonstration so here we go again okay that's better I'm now approximately 100 nanometers tall or about 20 million times smaller than my actual size at this scale a human red blood cell would be about as tall as a five-story building and I would be just the right size to demonstrate some of the attributes and functions of a single modern transistor like this one for the last four decades planar or 2d transistors have been at the core of transistor design and architecture here we see a form of silicon that creates a stream through which electrons flow the gate which is made of metal over a Heike insulator controls the flow of electricity in that stream it acts as an ordinary switch turning flow on and off that is if an ordinary switch had the ability to turn itself on and off over 100 billion times a second some key objectives in transistor design are to have as much current flowing as possible when in the on state for performance to have as close to zero current flowing when it is in the off state to minimize power usage and to switch very quickly between the two states again for performance as transistors get ever smaller one way to achieve this is to get tighter control by having the gate wrap around the channel as much as possible this is intel's new 3d transistor with a 3d transistors architecture we replace the flat two-dimensional stream with one or more three-dimensional fins the control is on all three sides of each fin rather than just one as in the planar transistor we call this a tri-gate turns that's real advantage over planer is the ability to operate at lower voltage with lower leakage providing an unprecedented combination of improved performance and energy efficiency this breakthrough invention allows Intel to create transistors that are smaller faster and use less power than ever before enabling a new generation of computing technology in every category from the fastest supercomputers to the smallest handheld devices so that about wraps it up all that's left is to just reverse the polarity on the shrink ray to bring me back to my normal side oh boy that's gonna be a long walk home

Channel: Intel

Views: 1,185,394

Keywords: video animation mark bohr gets small 22nm explained, world leader, silicon innovation, develops technologies, products, intel, intel laptop, intel commercial, microprocessors, intel core, microchip

Id: YIkMaQJSyP8

Length: 4min 19sec (259 seconds)

Published: Wed May 04 2011