The chip uses "backside power" which apparently has nothing to do with curry but can separate power and I/O wiring, shifting power lines to the back of the wafer. It is unclear who came up with the idea of backside power to describe it, but it is nice to know that Intel had us in mind.

IEEE Spectrum said that backside power can eliminate any possible interference between the data and power wires and increases logic transistor density and "leaves more room for the data interconnects above the silicon," while "the power interconnects can be made larger and less resistive."

Chipzilla has tested the idea on some of its current current transistors which saw a six per cent frequency boost as well as more compact designs and 30 per cent less power loss.

Backside power was as cheap and reliable and just as easy to test for defects. Intel is presenting the details of these tests in Tokyo before the gathered throngs at the IEEE Symposium on VLSI Technology and Circuits.

With PowerVia worked out, the only change Intel will have to make to complete its move from Intel 4 to the next node is to the transistor so if it succeeds it will be ahead of TSMC and Samsung, in offering nanosheet transistors and backside power.