IBM says it has built the first sub-1nm chip technology

IBM announced that it has built the world’s first sub-1nm chip technology, a transistor architecture at what it calls the 0.7nm, or 7-angstrom, node.

It is the kind of milestone the semiconductor industry has been straining toward for years, and the kind of claim that needs reading carefully, because a node name is no longer a measurement of anything physical.

The technology rests on a design IBM calls “nanostack,” which the company describes as the industry’s first three-dimensional, nanosheet-based transistor architecture.

Rather than laying transistors out across a flat plane and shrinking the gaps between them, nanostack stacks and staggers them vertically, using 3D sequential integration to fit more onto the same footprint.

The approach also lets engineers use different material combinations in each stacked layer, tuning the performance and power of each transistor more or less independently.