The pace of software and startup innovation only seems to be accelerating, but tech industry stalwarts like IBM continue to work behind the scenes to keep things quietly moving forward.
IBM Research's latest breakthrough is a big one: the first 7-nanometer node test chips with functional transistors.
The milestone, accomplished in conjunction with Global Foundries, Samsung and the SUNY Polytechnic Institute’s Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Engineering in Albany, New York, represents a $3 billion investment in chip technology research.
IBM's move forward is a significant leap ahead of today's 22-nanometer chips, allowing for the potential production of more advance chips in the future, impacting everything from mobile devices to cloud computing.
At the 7-nanometer range (comparatively, a strand of human DNA measures just 2.5 nanometers in diameter), the traditional physics around silicon transistors must be approached differently.
The scale down in size was achieved by using Silicon Germanium (SiGe) channel transistors and Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography integration. According to IBM, the breakthrough could deliver up to 50% better power and performance for future systems supporting Big Data and mobile products.
Just last year, IBM talked of possibly reaching the 7-nanometer scale (believed by some to be the limit of silicon chips) by the end of the decade. Therefore, this early demonstration of the technology, only a year later, offers hope that the company may also soon make strides toward its goals of possibly using silicon nanophotonics, graphene and carbon nanotubes as future chip materials.
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