IBM has introduced a working prototype 7-nm chips

IBM Corp. on Thursday announced the results of a project to develop new technologies for the production of processors, making it possible to create a 7-nm chips. Specialists of the company's presentation demonstrated working prototypes of 7 nm processors. The announcement, made on behalf of an international consortium led with IBM, is part of a project to produce the most advanced chips in the Hudson Valley (NY), where IBM has invested about $ 3 billion. The consortium also includes the power of New York, GlobalFoundries, Samsung and other companies.

The development of the new process technology processor - one of the largest events in the world semiconductor industry over the past few years. It is worth noting that due to this development still manages to follow the provisions of the закона Moore , according to which "the number of transistors placed on an integrated circuit chip doubles every 24 months." The density of transistors in new chip is four times higher than that of any existing chip, released in a series.

Who is the most modern processors are manufactured on 14-nm technology, these chips offers, for example, Intel. Work is in progress and in terms of the development of the production of processors on a 10-nm process technology, it is going to use Intel, TSMC and Samsung.



Thus, one processor manufactured by 7nm fabrication process will contain about 20 billion transistors. This is four times greater than that one of the most advanced modern commercial processors - 18 nuclear Intel Xeon Haswell-EP, which contains about 5, 56 billion transistors. It should be noted that to accommodate the same number of transistors each new generation of processors requires approximately 50% less floor space. Now we see more significant progress, although it should be pointed out that 7 nm processors are still in the research stage, the chips are not yet ready for commercial use.

IBM Corporation achieved this result through the use of silicon-germanium material instead of silicon only. With higher performance processors such are more energy efficient than the previous generation of chips. To compare 7 nm with different objects, we can recall that the diameter of the DNA strands is 2, 5 nm, and the diameter of the erythrocytes (red blood cells) - 7500 nm.

"I'm not surprised, because all this was predicted the plan of action, but it's fantastic," - commented on the achievement of IBM Sabhashish Mitra (Subhashish Mitra), head of Robust Systems Group at Stanford.

IBM is currently licenses its technology to a number of manufacturers and GlobalFoundries, which is owned by Emirates of Abu Dhabi, for the production of chips Broadcom, Qualcomm and Advanced Micro Devices.
As for the semiconductor industry, they will decide whether or not silicon-germanium technology is the best way for further development.



With regard to the issue of serial 7 nm processors, so far it is not known when this should happen. Nevertheless, no complicated problem in testing the obtained prototypes in the laboratory have and as barriers to entry into a series of processors and should not be.

Source: geektimes.ru/company/ibm/blog/253254/