How the Father of FinFETs Helped Save Moore’s Law

How the Father of FinFETs Helped Save Moore’s Law
by Daniel Nenni on 10-07-2025 at 8:00 am

Chenming Hu and Obama

In the early 2000s, Moore’s Law—the observation that the number of transistors on a chip doubles roughly every two years—was facing an existential crisis. As semiconductor nodes shrank below 90nm, planar transistors suffered from debilitating issues: leakage currents soared, power efficiency plummeted, and scaling became… Read More


Taiwan Semiconductor Tries To Pull A FinFAST One!

Taiwan Semiconductor Tries To Pull A FinFAST One!
by Daniel Nenni on 06-16-2013 at 7:00 pm


This completely misleading title is from a Seeking Alpha (SA) article, a stock investment version of the National Enquirer. As I mentioned inA Call to ARMs, fame and fortune seeking SA Authors make a penny per click so sensationalism sells. The article is not worth your time so I will save you the click and skip to the misguided conclusion:… Read More


FinFET Design Challenges Exposed!

FinFET Design Challenges Exposed!
by Daniel Nenni on 04-07-2013 at 6:00 pm

The first mention of FinFETs appeared on SemiWiki after the ISSCC conference in 2011. Dr. Jack Sun, TSMC Vice President of R&D and Chief Technology Officer, spoke about the power crisis the semiconductor industry is facing and FinFETs was one of the promising technologies that could help us. Since then, we have posted 100+ … Read More


GSA Silicon Summit at the Computer History Museum!

GSA Silicon Summit at the Computer History Museum!
by Daniel Nenni on 04-04-2012 at 9:52 pm

The first GSA Silicon Summit will address the complexity, availability and time-to-market challenges that the industry must overcome to enable low power, cost effective solutions to keep pace with Moore’s Law. With never ending customer demand of better, faster and cheaper, semiconductor manufacturers must continually… Read More


3D Transistors @ TSMC 20nm!

3D Transistors @ TSMC 20nm!
by Daniel Nenni on 11-06-2011 at 12:51 pm

Ever since the TSMC OIP Forum where Dr. Shang-Yi Chiang openly asked customers, “When do you want 3D Transistors (FinFETS)?” I have heard quite a few debates on the topic inside the top fabless semiconductor companies. The bottom line, in my expert opinion, is that TSMC will add FinFETS to the N20 (20nm) process node in parallel with… Read More