Ever felt frustrated about the battery life of your phone? Or, the performance of your laptop? Or, wondered how a self-driven car will avoid collision against a fast-approaching and out-of-control car?
Well…IBM could have the answer to all this.
The Armonk, New York-based technology giant unveiled a breakthrough in semiconductor design and process with the development of the world’s first chip announced with 2 nanometer (nm) nanosheet technology.
Demand for increased chip performance and energy efficiency continues to rise, especially in the era of hybrid cloud, AI, and the Internet of Things. IBM’s new 2 nm chip technology helps advance the state-of-the-art in the semiconductor industry, addressing this growing demand. It is projected to achieve 45% higher performance, or 75% lower energy use, than today’s most advanced 7 nm node chips.
Faster, cheaper, smaller and more energy efficient – that’s how the tech industry want their ideal hardware to be. Every time a company comes out with a more powerful chip in a smaller package, the goal posts move.
Semiconductors play critical roles in everything from computing, to appliances, to communication devices, transportation systems, and critical infrastructure and the potential benefits of these advanced 2 nm chips could include quadrupling cell phone battery life; slashing the carbon footprint of data centers, which account for one percent of global energy use and drastically speeding up a laptop’s functions, ranging from quicker processing in applications, to assisting in language translation more easily, to faster internet access.
“The IBM innovation reflected in this new 2 nm chip is essential to the entire semiconductor and IT industry,” said Dario Gil, SVP and Director of IBM Research.
“It is the product of IBM’s approach of taking on hard tech challenges and a demonstration of how breakthroughs can result from sustained investments and a collaborative R&D ecosystem approach.”
Increasing the number of transistors per chip can make them smaller, faster, more reliable, and more efficient. The 2 nm design demonstrates the advanced scaling of semiconductors using IBM’s nanosheet technology. Developed less than four years after IBM announced its milestone 5 nm design, this latest breakthrough will allow the 2 nm chip to fit up to 50 billion transistors on a chip the size of a fingernail.
More transistors on a chip also means processor designers have more options to infuse core-level innovations to improve capabilities for leading edge workloads like AI and cloud computing, as well as new pathways for hardware-enforced security and encryption.
IBM’s legacy of semiconductor breakthroughs also includes the first implementation of 7 nm and 5 nm process technologies.
