A group of researchers at the University of California at Berkeley has announced that they have created a prototype transistor dubbed FinFET that is smaller than any other transistor ever created. The smaller transistor has the capacity to reduce chip sizes (or increase transistor counts on the same sized chips) by up to 400 times. The technology will not be patented, and will be unveiled at the International Electronic Devices Meeting in Washington.
The FinFET transistor is a mere 18 nanometers in size, or .018 microns. Current processor technology creates transistors of 180 nanometers in length, or ten times larger than the FinFET. The FinFET may be able to go down to 9 nanometers in length eventually.
This appears to be an amazing breakthrough. What will probably happen is that everyone will learn from this process, and progress will continue as expected. I loved it when everyone started saying that we were going to hit the limits of processor shrinking soon due to physics. Obviously, those people forgot that there is no way to stop progress.
The fact that the researchers don't want to patent this technology is quite interesting. I guess they are doing it in the name of progress. My hat is off to them, but I'm not saying I would have made the same decision. It's not like Intel and AMD can't spare a few US$million to learn how to make faster Pentiums and Athlons ;)