Early transistors were chemically unstable and only suitable for low-power, low-frequency applications, but as transistor design developed, these problems were slowly overcome.

Then the battles were over electrical amplification, recording speeds, transistor design, speaker wire, engineering styles, room acoustics.

This technique was carried over into transistor designs also, part of the reason for which was that capacitors were large, expensive and unreliable.

But before we dive into what's new about Intel's transistor design, we first have to review how traditional transistors work.

Some significantly different circuit topologies exist compared to transistor designs.

The news is out - Intel has developed a three-dimensional approach to transistor design for microprocessors.

This allowed transistor designs to be significantly improved and optimized.

Though now it has been over five decades, Mason's finding of an invariant device characteristic still plays a significant role in transistor design.

The Berkeley researchers predict that the new transistor design could lead to devices that store 400 times as much data as today's densest memory chips.

Careful layout and transistor design must be used to minimize this source of error.