The announcement comes amid a race between organisations to build semiconductors that can handle increasingly demanding AI workloads.
Multinational technology giant IBM has announced the creation of what it claims is the world’s first technology capable of producing chips smaller than one nanometre.
According to IBM, the chip has a transistor architecture of 0.7 nanometres and can hold nearly 100bn transistors on a “fingernail”-sized surface, achieving roughly double the density of its 2-nanometre chip unveiled in 2021.
In order to create the chip, IBM reportedly developed a new transistor design called a nanostack, which lays transistors on top of each other in three dimensions, rather than the standard method of laying them flat, effectively fitting more into the same amount of available space.
Commenting on the achievement, Jay Gambetta, a director of IBM Research, said, “With our new nanostack architecture, we’re not just making smaller transistors, we’re reinventing how chips are built to deliver dramatically more power and energy efficiency.”
