In this paper, an analytical model for parasitic gate capacitances in gate-all-around cylindrical silicon nanowire MOSFETs (SNWTs) is developed for the first time. A practical 3-D architecture of SNWTs with surrounding-gate cylindrical channel and source/drain extension regions is taken into account in the parasitic gate capacitance modeling. The parasitic gate capacitances of the SNWT are divided into four parts: 1) outer fringe capacitance ; 2) inner fringe capacitance ; 3) overlap capacitance ; and 4) sidewall capacitance . The 3-D capacitance system is calculated by useful methods such as the equivalent transformation and inversion of Schwarz–Christoffel mapping. The obtained model agrees well with the results of 3-D electrostatic numerical simulations. The results show that the proportion of parasitic gate capacitances in the total capacitance is increased in this gate-all-around architecture due to the ultrasmall dimension of the SNWT channel; thus, the proportion of the intrinsic capacitance is reduced. Among the capacitances, is found to be the largest contributor to the total parasitic gate capacitance in FO1 delay calculation, and manifests itself as a nonnegligible parasitic capacitance. The developed capacitance model can be easily incorporated into a compact core model of SNWTs for further device/circuit design optimizations with various device parameters.