A US technology company has announced a major breakthrough in chip design, saying its latest innovation could eventually make it possible to fit 100 billion transistors onto a silicon chip no larger than a fingernail.
According to an international news agency, the most advanced commercial chips currently in the industry are built using a 2-nanometre process, with one nanometre equal to one-billionth of a metre. However, IBM says its new NanoStack technology is equivalent to approximately 0.7 nanometres, potentially making it the world’s first known chip technology to operate below the one-nanometre scale.
The company said it may still take several years before the technology reaches commercial production, but early test results have been highly encouraging.
IBM said the new chip demonstrated 50% better performance and 70% greater energy efficiency than the company’s existing 2-nanometre chip during initial testing.
The company noted that its 2-nanometre chip technology, introduced in 2021, had already delivered significant improvements in both performance and power efficiency.
Transistors are the fundamental building blocks of silicon chips, providing the computing power behind smartphones, laptops, gaming consoles, and a wide range of other electronic devices.
With the rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI), demand for increasingly powerful chips is rising, particularly for high-performance computers used in data centres. Experts say that the more transistors that can be packed onto a chip, the more powerful it becomes.
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