Today’s best chips, such as microprocessors that power our desktops and laptops, use 22-nanometer and 14-nanometer technology. The next manufacturing technology to arrive will be 10-nanometer production, and 7-nanometer chips will arrive after that.
According to IBM 7-nanometer breakthrough was made possible through its partnership with New York state, its development alliance with GlobalFoundries, its partnerships with Samsung and chip manufacturing equipment suppliers, and IBM researchers based at SUNY Poly’s NanoTech Complex in Albany, N.Y.
The 7-nanometer chips will push the limits of technology to meet the demands of cloud computing, big data, cognitive computing, and mobile products.
Developing a viable 7-nanometer node technology has been one of the greatest challenges of the semiconductor industry, IBM said. Pursuing such small dimensions through conventional processes has degraded chip performance and negated the expected benefits of scaling — or reducing chips to get higher performance, lower cost and lower power requirements.
IBM said researchers feared that 7-nanometer chips would be out of reach due to fundamental barriers of technology. But IBM said it used new semiconductor processes and techniques pioneered by IBM Research. It capitalized on past innovations such as silicon germanium (SiGe), channel transistors, and Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography integration at multiple levels. Those innovations helped IBM cut 50 percent of the chip size compared to the best 10-nanometer technology currently available.
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Semiconductor