IBM has achieved what it describes as as “major semiconductor breakthrough” by fitting nearly 100 billion transistors on the chip the size of a fingernail. This new chip design features nearly twice the density of the company’s 2 nm chip that debuted in 2021. IBM claims that this is the “world’s first sub-1 nanometer chip.”
Published technical results report the new chip is projected to offer a substantial leap in capability—up to 50% greater performance, or 70% greater energy efficiency than the company’s previous generation of chips.
To produce this chip, IBM researchers developed a new transistor architecture, called “nanostack,” which the company says is the industry’s first known three-dimensional, nanosheet-based design. The nanostack design vertically stacks and staggers transistors, taking advantage of 3D sequential integration to pack more transistors onto a chip. The design also unlocks the use of different material combinations within each stacked layer, optimizing performance and power efficiency of each transistor independent of the other.
