IBM announces world's first 1nm chip k4f4u

A IBM announced this Thursday, 06, the creation of the first chip with 2 nanometer technology, taking a new step forward for the semiconductor industry. Nanometers are a unit of measurement used by large technology companies to refer to the size of components inside processors, mainly. 1 nanometer means 0,000000001 meter. 3w6y3t

More broadly, just think about the processor inside your smartphone. It contains small parts called transistors, that is, thousands of semiconductors created to amplify electronic signals. It is estimated that within some processors Snapdragon the size of a fingernail, for example, there are about 6 billion transistors.

Therefore, the smaller the size of the transistors, the more of these little pieces we can put inside a chip, allocating more and more performance to that device. From there, companies like AMD e Intel, famous in the U segment, manage to put more cores in their products, reaching models with even 64 cores.

But how are such small components developed? The production process for these chips is known as lithography, which consists of a base material: silicon. As it is a millimeter development, production takes place in a similar way to a very small sculpture made by a microscopic 3D printer. From the silicon base, the transistors take shape with a kind of “needle”. However, don't think this process is that simple, as we're just trying to make the chips easier to understand.

A IBM gave a new kick to this segment, introducing chip development with 2 nanometers. This lithography enables 45% higher performance when compared to 7nm production, in addition to reducing the energy load by about 75%. According to official information from IBM, the chip with 2 nanometer technology would also have the following advantages:

• Reducing the carbon footprint of data centers: which for about 1% of the world's energy use. Therefore, changing the current manufacturing process for chips with 2 nanometer technology would help to mitigate the problem of climate change;
• Dramatically accelerate the functions of laptops, offering faster processing in applications: notebooks and portable devices have little physical space to allocate their components, therefore, they need to have reduced energy consumption and consequently a performance that is many times lower. The change in chip production can represent an advance in the performance of processors and graphics cards in notebooks;
• Quadruple cell phone battery life: Starting from the previous assumption, advancing in lithography also means reducing the energy load of devices, giving more longevity to smartphones;
• Contribute to faster object detection and reaction time in autonomous vehicles such as self-driving cars.

The chip innovation with 2 nanometer technology was only possible thanks to the researches of the IBM Research, a semiconductor research center based in Albany, New York. The studies were also carried out in partnership with the Samsung and Intel.

The new chips were also created from the implementation of nanosheet technology, which allowed the creation of such small components, with little energy consumption, high performance and better communication between the motherboard ports.

Currently, the manufacturing process with the smallest existing lithography is already 5 nm, present in the processor in the iPhone 12 with the processor A14 Bionic, with 11,8 billion transistors. Finally, we should expect this chip manufacturing with 2 nanometer technology to reach the market in the future, further optimizing our daily lives and providing more performance for operations involving core-level, Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things.