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Comment by bradly | Hacker News Reader

Anyone know if the 3D structure is patented by Intel? If so, wouldn't this give Intel a monopoly on transistors given how much better this new design performs?

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No this design was developed back when I was in college, the revolutionary change here is that Intel has a process to actually manufacture these things effectively and get decent yield. IBM had these things built in test cases back in 2007 but didn't have a manufacturing method.

Intel will likely not patent or reveal the manufacturing method thats how most semiconductor manufacturing technologies go. They tend to be trade secrets that are a combination of process and machinery which your competitors are unlikely to ever reproduce exactly, so no point in patenting it.

Thanks, that makes sense. I did find this patent from Intel about manufacturing the 3D transistor: http://www.google.com/patents?id=1D2gAAAAEBAJ&printsec=a...

here's another one:

"TRI-GATE DEVICE WITH CONFORMAL PVD WORKFUNCTION METAL ON ITS THREE-DIMENSIONAL BODY AND FABRICATION METHOD THEREOF"

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2008/0157207.html

"An alternative to the standard methods of building planar MOSFETs has been proposed to help alleviate some of the physical barriers to scaling down existing designs. These proposals involve the construction of three dimensional MOSFETs either in the form of a dual-gate transistor (FinFET) or as a tri-gate transistor as a replacement for the conventional planar MOSFET."

Intel doesn't have a monopoly on the technique, just a big technological head start. From the Anandtech article on this:"Intel isn't expecting its competitors to move to a similar technology until 14nm."

I don't know if it's patented, but TSMC is apparently working on deploying the technology (according to the NYTimes article linked above). So, there are definitely people who think that Intel doesn't have a monopoly on the design.

Plus, there's far from a consensus that this is the best design out there. It hasn't been proven in mass production yet. STMicroelectronics, a massive player in microcontrollers (which often go into applications with even tougher power constraints than mobile phones), is pushing Silicon on Insulator pretty for their next generations.

TSMC has plans to develop similar(not same) non-planar fab at 12nm, I think, by 2012. They call their's FINFET and showed a prototype in 2002.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multigate_device#FinFETs

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