Chipmakers have the luxury of looking at several process options when developing chips at the 28nm node and beyond.
Using bulk CMOS, for example, chipmakers can scale planar transistors down to 20nm. Then, at 20nm, planar runs out of gas due to the so-called short-channel effect. At that point, IC makers must migrate towards finFETs at 16nm/14nm and beyond.
Another process option is fully...
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