IBM Research announced today that it has built the first functional 7-nanometer test chips, in cooperation with GlobalFoundries, Samsung and SUNY Polytechnic Institute's Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Engineering.
The company hopes that the new processors it is currently testing will be the start of the smallest semiconductors available, and that new semiconductor technology will continue to shrink the coming productat least for two to three years.
To understand the size, an 7nm node is slightly larger than human DNA, which reaches 2,5nm in diameter. Processors today range from 10nm, 14nm and 22nm in size.
IBM with the new generation of chips is expected to deliver new innovations that will power the company's products. We are talking about supercomputers Watson as well as cloud and data center hosts.
According to IBM, the 7nm test chip was created using silicon germanium transistors or Germanium (SiGe) and Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography.
IBM plans to invest 3 billions of dollars over five years in the field of chips research and development, so we'll probably see amazing things.
On July 1, IBM closed the agreement to sell Globalfoundries microelectronics, which acquires intellectual property, production capacity and employees.
Globalfoundries, the former AMD maker, is the largest private semiconductor maker.
