IBM has unveiled a new chip design that crams 100 billion transistors onto a surface the size of a fingernail – a breakthrough the company says is the world's first known chip technology below 1 nanometre.
The current industry standard for the smallest chips, measured in nanometres – a billionth of a metre, the size of a few atoms – is around 2nm. But IBM claims its new tech is the equivalent of about 0.7nm, making it the first known chip architecture to dip below the 1nm barrier.
“IBM claims world's first sub-1nm chip tech with 100 billion transistors on a fingernail-sized surface.”
In tests, the prototype performed 50% better than IBM's own 2nm chip and was 70% more energy efficient, the company said. It posted similar leaps in performance and efficiency when it debuted its 2nm chip tech in 2021.
Jay Gambetta, director of IBM Research and IBM Fellow, called the NanoStack architecture a "landmark moment" for the future of chips. "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," he said.
Transistors are the building blocks of silicon chips, which power everything from smartphones and games consoles to laptops and the powerful data centre computers behind streaming, online banking and the generative AI boom. The more transistors manufacturers squeeze onto a chip, the more powerful it becomes. For decades, the number of transistors per chip has doubled roughly every two years – a phenomenon known as Moore's Law – but that pace is increasingly hard to sustain.
To extend the trend, chip designers are moving from horizontal cramming to 3D alternatives, making transistors taller. IBM's approach layers sheets of transistors on top of each other.
Professor Alan Woodward, a computer scientist at Surrey University, compared it with building a big block of flats rather than houses in a city. "IBM's NanoStack is like proposing a 100-storey skyscraper," he said.
Despite the breakthrough, it will be several years before the chip tech is ready for production, IBM acknowledged.