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by vondur 5530 days ago
I often wonder at the incredibly small size of these chips (22nm) if the have to worry about relativistic effects of electrons "jumping".
3 comments

Short answer yes.

Thats how transistors work in general, but the problem is you get small enough and its like the transistors want to turn them-selfs on, luckily the smaller you go the more leakage you get into other areas of the chip so those extra electrons just get seeped into there and ground out which mostly causes you to pull more power per square area.

You real issue is if those "jumping" electrons get wedged into corners near gates, then they can leave a transistor on permanently. But that's all part of the chip design process to avoid that kind of thing.

The quantum tunneling effect [1] is what you are referring to, right?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_tunnelling

Yes, sorry, been a while since I took P-chem.
yeah, they do. but those aren't relativistic effects, they're quantum effects.