Today's most cutting-edge process technology in the semiconductor industry has reached 3 nanometers, but this is still not the end of people's exploration.
In the first half of this year, IBM announced the world's first 2nm process, using GAA surround gate transistor technology, the density of up to 333 million transistors / square millimeter, almost twice TSMC 5nm, but also higher than the outside world estimateSMC 3nm process of 2.9 transistors / square millimeter, fingernail size chip has 50 billion transistors.
In terms of performance, IBM says that their 2nm process has 45% higher performance than the current 7nm at the same power consumption, and the output of the same performance is 75% lower power consumption.
The nanosheets of IBM's 2nm process are 3-layer stacks with a height of 75 nm, a width of 40 nm, a gate length of 12 nm, and a nanosheet height of 5 nm.
Half a year later, IBM once again brought new progress in advanced processes.
At the recent IEDM 2021 International Electronic Components Conference held in San Francisco, California, IBM and Samsung jointly announced a chip design technology called vertical transmission field effect transistor (VTFET), which stacks transistors vertically and changes the current to flow vertically, so that the number density of transistors can be increased again, and the power supply efficiency has been greatly improved, and the bottleneck currently faced in the 1nm process design has been broken.
It is understood that compared with the design of traditional horizontal stacked transistors, the vertical transmission of field effect transistors will increase the density of the number of transistors stacked, increase the calculation speed by twice, and by allowing the current to flow vertically, it can also reduce the power loss by 85% (performance and endurance cannot be combined at the same time).
The improvement brought about by the manufacturing is also obvious, IBM and Samsung claim that this process can one day make the phone use for a whole week on a single charge. It also says it can also make certain energy-intensive tasks, including encryption work, more energy-efficient, thereby reducing environmental impact.