IBM stacks transistors for sub-1 nanometre chip breakthrough

Faced with the impossible demand of shrinking already-minute transistors to make smaller, faster chips, IBM is now stacking them up to create the first sub-1 nanometer chip.

The boffins at Big Blue revealed its 0.7nm architecture this week, the first product of work to break the 1nm barrier for Moore’s Law, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore’s prediction a chip could fit double the transistors every two years.

During a June 25 press conference, IBM Research Director Jay Gambetta said the reveal was a “landmark moment” for pushing chip tech to the scale of atoms and delivering drastic performance and power efficiency gains.

He said: “With our new nanostack architecture, we’re not just making smaller transistors, we’re reinventing how chips are built to deliver dramatically more power and energy efficiency.”