- Intel announced on Wednesday that it had made the production of 3-D transistors a commercially viable reality and further claimed that in so doing, the company would continue to meet or beat the promise of Moore’s Law for years to come.
- As they’re used in integrated circuits like microprocessors, transistors can be thought of as switches, when they’re on, current flows, when they’re off, no current flows. The goal of the transistor designer is to make the perfect switch, lots of power can flow when turned on, absolutely no power flows when turned off, and the switch can change states very quickly, requiring very little power to do so.
- Using the valve analogy, you can immediately understand some truisms about transistors. Leaky ones are bad, and smaller ones can usually open and close faster than bigger ones, but they let less water (or current in the case of transistors) through.
The above are extracted from http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/processors/229402837
