IBM announced its acquisition of startup company Cleversafe. (Photo : Reuters)
While Intel's 14-nanometer Broadwell chips are delayed, the tech giant now plans to instead come up with 10-n chips in 2017, its last using pure silicon. By that time, IBM's 7-nm SiGe chips would have been cleared for commercial use.
IBM says that the chip would result in at least a 50 percent boost in power and performance improvement for next generation systems. To produce this silicon-germanium (SiGe) chip, IBM went beyond using pure silicon, reports PCWorld.
It carved the transistor channels out of SiGe alloy to improve its electron mobile at a smaller scale. To etch feature on the chip, IBM used lithography techniques. IBM and its partners for the chip production - made up of GlobalFoundries, Samsung, SUNY Polytechnic Institute - used extreme ultraviolet technology (EUV) that Intel has also heavily invested in the past few years.
The test chip was built at the IBM/State University of New York Polytechnic's research facility in Albany. Besides EUV, self-aligned quadruple patterning was used to achieve very small geometries, reports Arstechnica.
EUV involves using a narrower beam of light for more accurate etching of features with chip size getting smaller. The other alternative is to use multiple patterning. By stacking very tightly the chip, using a 30nm transistor pitch, the group managed to cut surface area on the current top-end chips by almost 50 percent.
If the majority of the chip producers would use 7nm manufacturing techniques, processors could contain 20 billion transistors, while the Broadwell-U processors released recently by Intel could only pack less than 10 percent at 1.9 billion transistors, notes PCWorld.
Mukesh Khare, point person of IBM Research, said the 7nm process is actually viable and it is not a one-off chip designed to scare its competitors such as Intel and TSMC. He explains to Arstechnica, "It is not a given that shrinking makes the next generation of chips less expensive. Given the performance improvements and power efficiencies achieved with 7n chips, it is expected that the performance-per-cost trade-offs make it a viable technology."
