More Transistors On Board.

In a significant breakthrough for chip technology, a team of engineers at the University of California at Berkeley claim they_ve crammed a record number of transistors onto a chip. Led by Chenming Hu, a professor in the department of electrical engineering and computer sciences, the team says their chip has 400 times more transistors than current designs. "It_s a new structure that will allow the industry to build much smaller transistors," said Hu. In contrast to today_s transistors, which use a single gate -- or switch -- to control the flow of electricity through the device, Hu_s team has figured out a relatively easy way to build double-gated transistors using today_s technology. The two gates, located at either end of the transistor, stand up vertically from the surface of the chip like a fork, which allows them to be made smaller and more numerous. Dubbed "FinFET," because the transistors (technically known as Field Effect Transistors) look like fins, the components measure only 18-nanometers (or 0.018 microns) across, which is ten-times smaller than today's smallest designs (0.18 microns) and the width of only 100 atoms. Hu said the transistors_ size may be halved in future designs. The Berkeley team will present a paper on its designs at the International Electronic Devices Meeting in Washington next month.