The thing about power chips is that smaller feature size is not necessarily a good thing. With logic chips, you are essentially moving data and doing math. And

The thing about power chips is that smaller feature size is not necessarily a good thing. With logic chips, you are essentially moving data and doing math. And you have electrons here and there representing data. It does not matter how many electrons represent a particular bit of data, as long as they can do it reliably. If you can get your feature sizes smaller and have one hundredth of the electrons represent the same bit -- good for you. As long as the data is correctly stored and the math is correct , the fewer electrons the better. Similarly it does not matter what voltage these electrons are kept at. As long as you can tell ones from zeros and can do the math correctly, the lower voltage, lower power and lower heat dissipated - the better. It is different with power electronics. There often you have to provide a certain amount of power to actually move something, or make a motor turn, or make a speaker make sound, etc. So the amount of current and/or voltage your chips produce will actually matter. Say you have a guitar amp. What if someone told you that at a great cost, they could make the chips at that amp a hundred times smaller. They would of course provide a hundred times less power which would make your speaker a hundred times more quiet (well, 2 db, but you get the idea). Would that be a good deal? Not really. That is why analog and power firms like ON Semi (mentioned in the article) tend to look for old equipment. They do not need everything this small. Many of their chips actually require larger features because they have to move a lot of current and/or handle high voltages. But that does not mean that their chips are old technology. Not all innovation is making things smaller. There is plenty of innovation going at the larger sizes.