IBM shows the world’s first 2-nanonmetre (nm) chipmaking technology

IBM has unveiled the world’s first 2-nanonmetre (nm) chipmaking technology.
IBM 2 nm wafer
It is projected to achieve 45 percent higher performance, or 75 percent lower energy use, than today’s most advanced 7 nm node chips.

The company’s new 2 nm chip technology helps advance the semiconductor industry.

“The IBM innovation reflected in this new 2 nm chip is essential to the entire semiconductor and IT industry,” Dario Gil, SVP and Director of IBM Research, said in a statement.

The benefits of these advanced 2 nm chips could include quadrupling cell phone battery life, only requiring users to charge their devices every four days, and slashing the carbon footprint of data centres, which account for one percent of global energy use, etc.

The 2 nm design demonstrates the advanced scaling of semiconductors using IBM’s nanosheet technology. Its architecture is an industry first.

Developed less than four years after IBM announced its milestone 5 nm design, this latest breakthrough will allow the 2 nm chip to fit up to 50 billion transistors on a chip the size of a fingernail.

The technology likely will take several years to come to market. Once a major manufacturer of chips, IBM now outsources its high-volume chip production to Samsung Electronics but maintains a chip manufacturing research center in Albany, New York that produces test runs of chips and has joint technology development deals with Samsung and Intel to use IBM’s chipmaking technology.

The 2-nanometer chips will be smaller and faster than today’s leading edge 5-nanonmeter chips, which are just now showing up in premium smartphones like Apple’s iPhone 12 models, and the 3-nanometer chips expected to come after 5-nanometer.

The technology IBM showed Thursday is the most basic building block of a chip: a transistor, which acts like an electrical on-off switch to form the 1s and 0s of binary digits at that foundation of all modern computing.

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