Intel's 22nm tri-gate transistors

To shrink its microprocessor circuit elements to the 22-nanometer size -- just 22 billionths of a meter -- Intel had to develop a technology called tri-gate transistors. Transistors are tiny switches, with a gate on top controlling whether electrical current flows through a silicon channel underneath. The big innovation for 22nm manufacturing is that the channels are now fins that protrude out of the plane of the silicon chip. Previously they lay flat within the chip. In this photo of the 3D "tri-gate" design, the gates are the taller ridges going up and to the right, and the fins are the somewhat lower ridges going up and to the left. A single transistor can have multiple fins going underneath a single gate.