IBM Corp said on Thursday that it had made working versions of ultradense computer chips, with roughly four times the capacity of the most powerful chips on the market.
The announcement, made on behalf of an international consortium led by computer giant IBM, is part of an effort to manufacture advanced computer chips in New York’s Hudson Valley, where IBM is investing US$3 billion in a private-public partnership with New York State, GlobalFoundries Inc, Samsung Electronics Co and equipment vendors.
The development lifts a bit of the cloud that has fallen over the semiconductor industry, which has struggled to maintain its legendary pace of doubling transistor density every two years.
Photo: AP
Intel, which for decades has been the industry leader, has faced technical challenges in recent years. Moreover, technologists have begun to question whether the longstanding pace of chip improvement, known as Moore’s Law, would continue past the current 14 nanometer (nm) generation of chips.
Each generation of chip technology is defined by the minimum size of fundamental components that switch current at nanosecond intervals. Today the industry is making the commercial transition from what the industry generally describes as 14nm manufacturing to 10nm manufacturing.
Each generation brings roughly a 50 percent reduction in the area required by a given amount of circuitry. IBM’s new chips, though still in a research phase, suggest semiconductor technology will continue to shrink at least through 2018.
The company said that it has working samples of chips with 7nm transistors. It made the research advance by using silicon-germanium instead of pure silicon in key regions of the molecule-sized switches.
The new material makes possible faster transistor switching and lower power requirements. The tiny size of these transistors suggests further advances will require new materials and new manufacturing techniques.
As points of comparison to the size of the 7nm transistors, a strand of DNA is about 2.5nm in diameter and a red blood cell is roughly 7,500nm in diameter.
IBM said that would make it possible to build microprocessors with more than 20 billion transistors.
“I’m not surprised, because this is exactly what the road map predicted, but this is fantastic,” said Subhashish Mitra, director of the Robust Systems Group at Stanford University’s Electrical Engineering Department.
Even though IBM has shed much of its computer and semiconductor manufacturing capacity, the announcement indicates the company remains interested in supporting the US’ high-tech manufacturing base.
“This puts IBM in the position of being a gentleman gambler as opposed to being a horse owner,” said Richard Doherty, president of Envisioneering, a Seaford, New York-based consulting firm, referring to the fact that IBM’s chip manufacturing facility was acquired by GlobalFoundries.
“They still want to be in the race,” he added.
IBM licenses the technology it is developing to a number of manufacturers and GlobalFoundries, owned by the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, to make chips for companies including Broadcom Corp, Qualcomm Inc and Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
The semiconductor industry must now decide if IBM’s bet on silicon-germanium is the best way forward. It must also grapple with the shift to using extreme ultraviolet light to etch patterns on chips at a resolution that approaches the diameter of individual atoms.
In the past, Intel said it could see its way toward 7nm manufacturing. However, it has not said when that generation of chipmaking might arrive.
IBM also declined to speculate on when it might begin commercial manufacturing of this technology generation. This year, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電) said it planned to begin pilot product of 7nm chips in 2017. However, unlike IBM, it has not demonstrated working chips to meet that goal.
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