By Roland Piquepaille
CNET News.com and ExtremeTech are both reporting that Motorola has developed a new type of transistor that combines two independent gates inside a single transistor. This could lead to lower power consumption, faster processing speeds and smaller circuits.According to this press release from Motorola, this "could provide a major boost to the continuing drive toward smaller, more powerful chips."
Called the Multiple Independent Gate Field Effect Transistor or MIGFET, the device allows for one transistor to contain multiple independent gates.
Here is a picture of such a vertical transistor with two gates on each side of the vertical channel (Credit: Motorola DigitalDNA Laboratories).
ExtremeTech gives some details about the technology.
Traditional transistors are built in a horizontal plane, and contain a single gate. Motorola's technology adds a second gate to the another side of the silicon, packing two transistors where once only one would fit. Moreover, the two transistor gates are elctrically isolated, meaning that they can act independently.
Michael Kanellos, for CNET News.com, goes further.
In most multi-gate proposals, the transistor gates act in concert. In Motorola's Multiple Independent Gate Field Effect Transistor (MIGFET), the transistor gates are electrically isolated, so they can work together, or function like independent transistors, depending on the chip designer's intent. This could lead to a wider variety of options for increasing performance and reducing power consumption. Complex calculations that require millions of transistors, for instance, can be performed on half as many transistors, according to Motorola.
Motorola didn't say when this new technology will be incorporated in its products. However, Kanellos has some insights.
Motorola did not commit to when such transistors could be included in their processors, but different manufacturers have said that enhancements like this could emerge with the 45-nanometer manufacturing process, which is expected to debut in 2007 or 2008.
For more information, you can browse the Motorola DigitalDNA Laboratories. And for more details about multigate design, you can read this EE Times article, "Multigate option arises for 45 nm."
Sources: Michael Kanellos, CNET News.com, November 10, 2003; ExtremeTech, November 10, 2003; David Lammers, EE Times, September 22, 2003