Computing · 2012
FinFET
A 3D transistor with the channel as a raised fin.
Chenming Hu's team proposed the FinFET in 1999, and Intel shipped it in 22 nm Ivy Bridge chips in 2012. Wrapping the gate around a fin controlled leakage and carried scaling to 3 nm.
What it built on 1
What it led to 2
Related measurements
The dashed line marks when it first worked.
Transistors per microprocessor Latest: 58.2B transistors (2021) Source: Our World in Data
ML hardware FLOP/s per dollar Source: Epoch AI, ML hardware (CC BY 4.0)