Modern chips depend on technologies that control electrical current, store information, and move data between components. Their performance reflects advances in transistor design, manufacturing precision, materials, and packaging.

These developments support everything from smartphones and computers to electric vehicles and data centers. Here are 10 important semiconductor technologies, how they work, and why they matter.

FinFETs are transistors with narrow silicon channels shaped like upright fins rather than flat structures. A gate wraps around three sides of each fin, controlling the electrical current flowing through it.

This design improves control over unwanted current leakage as transistors become smaller. FinFETs helped manufacturers increase performance and energy efficiency across generations of smartphone, computer, and server processors.

Gate-all-around transistors surround the current-carrying channel with a gate on every side. Implementations can use thin silicon nanosheets or nanoribbons stacked vertically, with Intel’s RibbonFET providing one example.

The surrounding gate offers tighter control over current flow, helping address the challenges of further transistor scaling. Engineers can also adjust channel width to balance performance, power consumption, and the space occupied by a device.

Extreme ultraviolet lithography uses light with a wavelength of 13.5 nanometers to transfer circuit patterns onto a light-sensitive coating on semiconductor wafers.

The process requires specialized mirrors and a vacuum environment because EUV light is readily absorbed by many materials.

EUV enables finer patterning and can reduce the number of patterning steps required for certain chip layers.

High numerical aperture EUV improves optical resolution further, although neither its wavelength nor a process-node name directly describes every transistor dimension.

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