The good old FET still has more to give

Back in the day, when the world was a simpler place, transistors were planar. Source, channel and drain were differently doped regions of silicon positioned next to each other. Slap a dielectric layer and a gate on top, and you had yourself a metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET).

With only minor tweaks, the MOSFET served as the semiconductor industry’s workhorse for decades. It allowed itself to be shrunk so willingly that Moore’s Law was understood to be about the increasing component density of integrated circuits, even though it was very clear that there was a bit more to chip complexity than that.