IBM has unveiled a chip design it says could cram 100 billion transistors onto a surface the size of a fingernail — a breakthrough the firm claims is the world's first known chip technology below one nanometre.
The new architecture, named NanoStack, is the equivalent of roughly 0.7 nanometres, a scale measured in billionths of a metre. Current industry-standard chips are around two nanometres. But while IBM's prototype performed 50% better and was 70% more energy efficient than its own 2nm chip in tests, the company warned it will be several years before the technology reaches production.
“IBM claims world's first sub-1nm chip technology, packing 100 billion transistors on a fingernail-sized chip.”
“With our new NanoStack architecture, we're not just making smaller transistors, we're reinventing how chips are built to deliver dramatically more power and energy efficiency,” said Jay Gambetta, director of IBM Research and IBM Fellow. He called the development a “landmark moment” for the future of chips.
To keep pace with Moore’s Law — the decades-old observation that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years — designers have increasingly turned to three-dimensional alternatives, altering transistor shapes to make them taller. IBM’s approach layers sheets of transistors on top of each other.
Professor Alan Woodward, a computer scientist at Surrey University, compared the technique to urban planning. “IBM's NanoStack is like proposing a 100-storey skyscraper,” he said, describing it as building a “big block of flats rather than houses in a city.”
Transistors are the fundamental components of silicon chips, which power everything from smartphones and games consoles to laptops and the data centres that handle streaming, online banking and generative AI. The more transistors manufacturers can fit onto a chip, the more powerful it becomes. But with billions already on some chips, experts broadly agree that sustaining the pace of Moore’s Law indefinitely is increasingly difficult.
IBM previously announced similar performance and efficiency gains when it debuted its 2nm chip technology in 2021. The NanoStack breakthrough, the firm says, offers a path forward — even if it will take years to turn the prototype into a product.