Reports from Korea indicate that Samsung and TSMC are scrambling to be the first company to stabilize 10nm chip production to win a boatload of iPhone chip orders from Apple in following years.
Advertisement
It’s not a given that shrinking makes the next generation of chips less expensive.
IBM researchers added a layer of silicon germanium to make the transistors switch on and off faster.
Currently, semiconductor chip manufacturers are not set up to use the EUV method and so large-scale development of the chip is on hold for now. This translates to a faster process speed. Such microchips go into myriad devices, including computers. IBM is intending to build a new manufacturing plant to start commercially producing the chips. That’s half the size of today’s cutting-edge 14nm chips. To reach such tiny geometries, self-aligned quadruple patterning (SAQR) and EUV lithography is used. It is important to note that there are many incentives for companies to go fabless, so this sale does not restrict the potential commercial value of 7 nm technology.
IBM has just made a breakthrough in chip making technology. It also ensures that the two-year rule of Moore’s law-a celebrated pace that the computer industry has often boasted about in the past-will continue thriving for at least a few more years.
“This is a welcome sign for the chip industry”, said Envisioneering analyst Richard Doherty.
“This is research that has been done and is not an actual product, but it is a great example that Moore’s Law continues and shows the potential for smartphones, tablets, PCs and even cars to be twice as smart as they were before at the same energy level”, Patrick Moorhead, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategies, told ABC News. IBM alone has pledged to spend about $3 billion over the coming five years for research aimed at reducing the size of chipsets. Even so, 14nm is incredibly tiny. To get to the width of a human hair, you’d need roughly 10,000 of them. “These invisible light waves are nearly X-rays in wavelength!”
IBM’s done the hard work and created a functioning proof of concept. “That’s why IBM has remained committed to an aggressive basic research agenda that continually pushes the limits of semiconductor technology”.
What benefits do the 7nm chip provide?
And since it’s so far off from the consumer market, IBM doesn’t have any estimations of what the new tech will cost. Since it’s still under way. The current state of the chip art is 10-nanometer lithography. 10nm is slated for 2016 or 2017 so 7nm may be expected in 2017 or 2018 at the earliest.
Today’s servers are powered by microprocessors that use 22-nanometer or 14-nanometer node chips.
Advertisement
However, GlobalFoundries have already acquired IBM’s microelectrics business just a week ago. This would slow development and mean Moore’s Law would take more than two years to evolve again. As process nodes become ever-smaller, silicon is insufficient for delivering the kind of performance improvements that companies like IBM and Intel want to bring to the table. Nanobots could also be made to target viruses and bacteria, leading to a new era of medicine.
