IBM scientists prepare test wafers with 5nm silicon nanosheet transistors IBM

IBM is clearly not buying into the idea that Moore's Law is dead after it unveiled a tiny new transistor that could revolutionise the design, and size, of future devices.

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Along with Samsung and Globalfoundries, the tech firm has created a 'breakthrough' semiconducting unit made using stacks of nanosheets. The companies say they intend to use the transistors on new five nanometer (nm) chips that feature 30 billion switches on an area the size of a fingernail. When fully developed, the new chip will help with artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and cloud computing.

A scan of IBM Research Alliance’s 5nm transistor IBM

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"For business and society to meet the demands of cognitive and cloud computing in the coming years, advancement in semiconductor technology is essential," said Arvind Krishna, senior vice president, Hybrid Cloud, and director, IBM Research.

IBM has been developing nanometer sheets for the past 10 years and combined stacks of these tiny sheets using a process called Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography to build the structure of the transistor.


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"Using EUV lithography, the width of the nanosheets can be adjusted continuously, all within a single manufacturing process or chip design," IBM and the other firms said. This allows the transistors to be adjusted for the specific circuits they are to be used in.

A wafer of chips with 5nm silicon nanosheet transistors IBM


Currently, the group says, the process used to create transistors (known (FinFET) is used to scale chips down to 5nm, but the process is far from efficient.

This latest work claims to be able to create 5nm chips "at a commercial scale". At present, 10nm chips are available and IBM says a 5nm chip will be able to "deliver 40 per cent performance enhancement at fixed power, or 75 per cent power savings at matched performance".

Previously, in 2015, IBM revealed how it was using carbon nanotubes to take computer processors beyond silicon. In that work, nanoscale tubes that are one atom thick were rolled from sheets of graphene.