IBM claims breakthrough in developing tiny computer chip

IBM said that development of 7nm chips has proved a real challenge for the semiconductor industry.

Various physical effects kick in as you shrink the gate size: for one thing, the dynamic power consumption of the transistors drops, but the static consumption increases as they leak more current.

Each transistor, which in computers act like switches, in IBM’s new almighty chip will measure at around seven nanometers in diameter – this is significantly smaller than the 10 to 14-nanometer transistors we now use.

A nanometer is about 1/10,000 the width of a human hair, explains Supratik Guha, IBM Research’s director of physical science, so about 20,000 transistors will fit on a chip the size of a fingernail.

But they are a long way from market. Previous attempts to make a 7nm chip haven’t been efficient enough and have needed too much power to run, the New York Times points out.

It is, perhaps, ironic that IBM had to pay Globalfoundries $1.5 billion to take ownership of Big Blue’s chip-making facilities in upstate New York.

This breakthrough also marks the continuation of Moore’s law, an observation that says how over the history of computing hardware, the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. But in recent years, scientists have been straining to keep Moore’s Law alive, as we start to approach the physical limit of how small we can make silicon chips.

IBM says it has produced the world’s first 7nm (nanometer) chip, arriving well ahead of competitors, thanks to advances in its chip technology. The firm said earlier this year that it is still researching options for 7nm technologies.

For decades, the widely accepted computing principle of Moore’s law seemed like a given. IBM wrote in a blog post: “Society is more than 50 years into the journey of silicon semiconductors, and, thanks to our work on the 7 nm node, the technology still has some runway”. IBM collaborated on the latest developments with researchers there as well as GlobalFoundries and Samsung Electronics Co. Generally, the smaller the technology, the faster the chip’s potential, and the more compact it can be. IBM, working at SUNY Polytechnic Institute in Albany, said it perfected the manufacturing for 7nm chips using extreme ultra violet lithography and silicon germanium in parts of the chip instead of just silicon.