IBM said on Thursday that it had made working versions of ultradense computer chips, with roughly four times the capacity of today’s most powerful chips.
The announcement, made on behalf of an international consortium led by IBM, the giant computer company, is part of an effort to manufacture the most advanced computer chips in New York’s Hudson Valley, where IBM is investing $3 billion in a private-public partnership with New York State, GlobalFoundries, Samsung 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.
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 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 14-nanometer manufacturing to 10-nanometer manufacturing.
The company said on Thursday that it had working samples of chips with seven-nanometer transistors. It made the research advance by using silicon-germanium instead of pure silicon in key regions of the molecular-size switches.
The new material makes possible faster transistor switching and lower power requirements. The tiny size of these transistors suggests that further advances will require new materials and new manufacturing techniques.
As points of comparison to the size of the seven-nanometer transistors, a strand of DNA is about 2.5 nanometers in diameter and a red blood cell is roughly 7,500 nanometers 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 in the Electrical Engineering Department at Stanford University.
Read more: IBM Discloses Working Version of a Much Higher-Capacity Chip
The Latest on: Ultradense Computer Chips
via Google News
The Latest on: Ultradense Computer Chips
- Anbernic’s handheld gaming PC is coming in Julyon June 22, 2022 at 9:34 am
Anbernic is a Chinese company that makes handheld gaming devices, most of which are retro gaming devices powered by ARM processors and designed to run Android or Linux software. But it looks like the ...
- World’s First AV1 Decoder Silicon IP with Support for 12-bit Pixel Size and 4:4:4 Chroma Sub-Sampling Released by Allegro DVTon June 16, 2022 at 6:32 am
Allegro DVT, the leading provider of video processing silicon IPs and video compliance streams, has announced that its D310 AV1 Decoder silicon IP now supports 12-bit sample size and 4:4:4 chroma ...
- London Computer Systems Wins Enquirer Media's Top Workplace Award for the 11th Consecutive Yearon June 14, 2022 at 9:30 am
LCS is home to some of Cincinnati's best and brightest, and is continuously recognized as one of the best places to work in the tristate area. CINCINNATI (PRWEB) June 14, 2022 London Computer Systems ...
- IBM Gives Moore's Law a Boost with Innovative Ultradense Chipon May 3, 2022 at 5:00 pm
Ask chip manufactures and Moore's Law has been looking more and more like a theory with each passing year. But IBM has just revealed a prototype of an "ultradense" computer chips that the company says ...
via Bing News