It's usually Intel that leads the way with the latest processor innovations, but today an IBM-led consortium has leapt ahead by announcing it has produced the world's first functional 7nm node test chips. The most advanced commercial CPUs of today are built using a 14nm process and there are plans afoot for 10nm chips in 2016, but shrinking manufacturing any further has proven challenging and not at all straightforward.

"7nm node has remained out of reach due to a number of fundamental technology barriers," says IBM, with the most notable among them being the material properties of silicon itself. IBM's group of collaborators, which includes Samsung and the SUNY Polytechnic Institute, replaced pure silicon with a silicon-germanium (SiGe) alloy for the channel transistors to improve electron mobility at that minuscule scale. It also employed Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography to etch the microscopic patterns into each chip.

This isn't the first time that IBM has dipped below the 10nm bar with its research into future chip technology, as back in 2012 the company demonstrated 9nm transistors built out of carbon nanotubes. The present 7nm SiGe transistors appear to be somewhat more viable for commercial production, though they're still at least a few years away from reaching that stage. Once they do, IBM anticipates they'll offer "close to 50 percent area scaling improvements over today’s most advanced 10nm technology." In other words, a processor built at 7nm is expected to have twice the power density of one built at 10nm. It's the generation after the next generation.

The future is even tinier than you can imagine

IBM's announcement today is a major milestone in its five-year, $3 billion research program to "push the limits of chip technology needed to meet the emerging demands of cloud computing and Big Data systems." That's really at the heart of the grand old company's efforts: it's advancing manufacturing techniques only as a means to augment its cloud and big data services. Part of that shift was this month's completion of the sale of IBM's chipmaking unit to GlobalFoundries, a semiconductor foundry that was spun off from AMD back in 2009. GlobalFoundries is a member of the research group that successfully produced the new 7nm node chips, and it will serve as IBM's exclusive processor manufacturer for the next 10 years. And so, even as IBM exits the business of making chips itself, it continues to work on designing and refining the chips that will power our collective future.