IBM plows $3 billion into 7nm chip research and 'post-silicon' computer technology

IBM has announced that it's plowing $3 billion into two R&D programs that will hopefully make it the authority on 7-nanometer-and-beyond chip technologies. One R&D project will look at pushing conventional silicon chips as far as they will go (around 7nm), and the other will be tasked with finding new materials and techniques that can take us even further (quantum computing, carbon nanotubes, graphene, III-V). IBM also took the opportunity to remind everyone that it's already the biggest player in 7nm-and-beyond technology, with over 500 applicable patents (more than double the nearest competitor). While most major chip makers (Intel, TSMC, GloFo, IBM) seem confident that they can take standard silicon CMOS chips down to 10nm, they are a little bit nervous about the prospect of 7nm and beyond. At around 7nm, the current building blocks of silicon transistors just won't behave in the same way; when the gate is just a few atoms across, classical physics goes out the door and quantum physics (which behaves rather differently) takes over. While different transistor designs (such as 3D) allow us to take silicon a little further, the laws of physics will eventually catch up.

To reach 7nm and beyond, IBM Research is taking a pincer approach. First, it will take serious effort to actually get silicon down to 7nm -- and more importantly, to develop processes that can make 14nm, 10nm, and 7nm chips economically. As we covered last month, making silicon transistors smaller isn't inherently all that difficult -- but doing it without breaking the bank on expensive equipment is. IBM wants to develop new tools and techniques that will help silicon scale down to 7nm, and potentially beyond.

The second approach is potentially more exciting, at least as far as ExtremeTech is concerned. Rather than pushing silicon indefinitely, this second research project will look at other materials and techniques that might more easily take us to 7nm and beyond. Materials such as III-V semiconductors (notably gallium arsenide, GaAs) have around 10 times the electron mobility of silicon, allowing for smaller transistors with much higher performance and lower power consumption. Likewise, IBM is looking into graphene and carbon nanotubes, both of which have incredibly high electron mobility and can (theoretically) be fashioned into very small structures. IBM has already created a carbon nanotube transistor with a 10nm channel that showed no sign of performance degradation due to its diminutive size (CNTs are just single layers of carbon/graphene rolled up into a tube, and are thus very, very small).