Comment by nimish

>Operating transistors outside the linear region (the saturated "on") on a billion+ scale

The whole point of switching transistors is that we _only_ operate them in the fully saturated on or totally off IV-curve region?

Subthreshold circuits are commercially available, just unpopular since all the tools are designed for regular circuits. And the overlap between people who understand semiconductors and people who can make computational tools is very limited, or it's just cheaper to throw people+process shrinks at the problem.