Big name publishers may be essential for great _looking_ articles.
A great article, though is usually not a matter of beauty.
Actually, we have been living in a very similar situation since home power-tools became available. There is so much stuff you can make for yourself literally in minutes.
People in the eastern bloc actually lived a lot like that. Food, electricity and housing (and a scarce collection of consumer goods) were provided by the state, a lot of the rest was made at home. They used to get blueprints for clothes they wanted and produce them themselves.
It just gets problematic as long as there is any discernable difference between the self-made product and a commercial alternative. Any small defect in the self-made product will lead to a percieved lack of value.
Otherwise, the economy will get more intellectual property based, I guess.
BTW, power and water are already provided by the state in some western countrys. Food and land though, not so much.
Well let's hope that with the incredible power of a computer, they can distinguish commercial space traffic from global thermonuclear war.
Your typical first strike would involve lots of simultaneous launches. And the trajectories of icbm's would be suspiciously suborbital. Complicated equipment doing complicated pattern recognition. Built by the lowest bidder. What could possibly go wrong...
Yes. You may note, that was my original point. Intel fielding them before AMD and the rest does is what the real news is about here.
Nevermind the tautology. I'm tired and drunk. Sorry.
But a link to the inventors would have been
And the kind of FinFET technology used is more a matter of what is more effective in your semiconductor process. Whether it's twingsate, trigate, quadgate, whatever. There's a good chance what they published years ago is not all that similar to what they did for this.
Well, the original FinFETs were twingate (as were some similar transistors before the term FinFET was coined for them), intel invented trigate. In the end, this still is the first kind of FinFET coming to market.
I just think inventing them in the first place is more inventive then refining them.
My point of them having been quite a long time in the making still stands. Just note the age of that press release (2002).
Oh dear. They called them 3D-Transistors even back then.
What is indeed news is that intel is fielding them first.
Well, while it is nice a slashdot article has finally been written about FinFET's - there may already have been one, I just can't remember - these devices have been widely guessed to be a part of the 22 nm technology node for quite some time. (see: http://www.itrs.net/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/22_nanometer ).
They offer more effectivity for your gates as the field is not coming from one, but from 3 sides to the channel. That means a bit more scalability, but not much more. There is only a bit of improvement possible for the future in putting the gate below the channel as well (as hard as that may be, i, personally, don't think it would be worthwhile), so this won't save moore's law in the end.
It may not surprise you that they actually haven't been invented by intel, and are not new.
The term has been coined more than 10 years ago ( http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=823848 ) (find one of the free pdf's of this classic paper for yourself)
What is more interesting is how far down these transistors will scale in the extreme ultraviolet processes that are emerging right now.
Dealing with the problem of pure staff accumulation, all our researches ... point to an average increase of 5.75% per year. -- C.N. Parkinson
