Why are FinFET Transistors Important?

Why are FinFET Transistors Important?

 

Recently we have been talking a lot about FinFET Transistors, about how almost all next generation PC products will be built using them, but a lot of us consumers simply do not know why they are important, so today we have decided to address that.

Whether you are going to buy a new product later this from AMD, Nvidia or right now from Samsung and Intel you will be buying a product that uses FinFET transistors, offering better performance and efficiency than their previous generation counterparts that use traditional Planar transistors.  

In basic terms FinFET transistors are designed to give greater control over the transistor than traditional Planar transistors and help prevent what is known as power leakage, which has been becoming a greater and greater problem as transistors and the products we make with them have gotten smaller and smaller. 

Intel has been using FinFET Transistors ever since their Ivy-Bridge series of CPUs were released in 2012, which is one of the many reasons why they have been dominating their competition in terms of power consumption in the X86 CPU market.  

  

 

By reducing amount of voltage that is leaked whenever the transistor is tuned of allows FinFET products to operate with a lower power consumption and allows products to achieve a lot more performance when in a lower power state, which is one of the many reasons why chip makers are so rapidly jumping on this new technology. 

The largest difference between a FinFET transistor and a Planar Transistor is its 3D design, which allows the gate of the transistor to  have a much greater area of control over the gap between the source and the drain of a transistor, which is where a lot of power loss occurs through current leakage. 

 

    

While a lot of this stuff may sound very complex, it is fairly simple to explain visually, so I have included this video from ARM back in late 2012, which explains how FinFET transistors work through a more visual means.  

 

 

FinFET Transistors are no doubt what will make this year a great your for PC hardware, offering us more performance at lower wattages than ever before. This leap in processing tech is also what is allowing AMD to build their new Zen architecture, which is a great chance for us to get some more competition back into the X86 CPU market, which is no doubt a great thing for consumers. 

The benefits of the FinFET transistor will be what will bring mobile to a whole new level of performance and allow us to continue making such large leap in performance computing over a relatively small number of years.    

 

You can join the discussion on FinFET Transistors on the OC3D Forums.