I haven't been so excited for a long time! IBM's new chip is more than 10,000 times thinner than a hair

Although Intel is a leader in processor innovation technology, on July 9, IBM announced that it had produced the world's first 7-nanometer (nm) chip , with computing power about four times that of the current most powerful chip.

IBM pointed out that the new 7-nanometer chip will be able to help meet future needs for cloud computing, big data systems, cognitive computing, mobile products, etc., claiming that it can greatly boost the computing power of "everything from smartphones to spacecraft."

What is 7 nanometers? We can compare it to a human hair, which is 100,000 nanometers thick, about 14,000 times thicker than a 7-nanometer chip. A 7-nanometer chip is roughly the same order of magnitude as a DNA chain, but a DNA chain is slightly smaller, at 2.5 nanometers wide.

This news excited the American technology community because it proved that Moore's Law has not failed!

50 years ago, Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, proposed the famous Moore's Law: when the price remains unchanged, the density of transistors on the chip doubles every 18-24 months, and the performance will also double. In other words, the performance of the computer that can be bought at the same price doubles every 2 years or so. This law reveals the speed of progress in information technology.

Moore's Law has been proven for half a century, but in recent years, it has become increasingly difficult to achieve. Most of the chips used in personal computers and other devices we use today are between 14-22 nanometers. But even Intel is six months late in perfecting 14 nanometer technology.

After the 14nm process, the industry generally believes that the semiconductor process has hit a hurdle. Take Intel, the most capable company, for example. It has long claimed that it has the ability to reach the height of 7nm. However, its 10nm technology is still under development and has recently been announced to be postponed indefinitely. In April this year, TSMC also announced the transformation of commercial chips from 14nm to 10nm, saying that it will bring 10nm process to everyone in 2016, and 7nm in 2017, but it did not show the 7nm prototype.

Mukesh Khare, vice president of IBM Semiconductor Technology Research, said that this test chip added a material called "silicon germanium" (SiGe) to the 7-nanometer transistor for the first time, replacing the original pure silicon, and achieved the research progress of "molecular-size switches". At the same time, Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography technology was used.

It is reported that compared with 10 nanometers, the area will be reduced by nearly half after using the 7 nanometer process, but at the same time, because it can accommodate more transistors (more than 20 billion), the performance will also be improved by 50%.

Currently, IBM's 7-nanometer chip is at least several years away from commercialization.

It should be pointed out that this news is indeed exciting, but the "Blue Giant" IBM itself is no longer in the chip business. Just in early July, IBM sold its chip business to Global Foundries for $1.5 billion.

The R&D of chip products is extremely expensive, requiring billions of dollars in investment, and the replacement cycle is short. Such cost investment requires companies to have huge shipments to recover costs. However, the amount of chips IBM needs is far from enough to consume its own chip production capacity. Previously, IBM had many types of products such as PC processors and game console processors, and the demand for chip products was huge, but with the decline of consumer electronics business, IBM's product line continued to shrink. Simply put, IBM can no longer "support" the chip business.

IBM's official statement on selling its chip business is, "Further focus on institutional innovation and basic semiconductor research and development to promote future cloud computing, mobile and big data workloads." In other words, IBM will still try to pursue the most advanced technology. The 7-nanometer research and development is part of IBM's $3 billion research and development at the University at Albany, State University of New York, in collaboration with Samsung and GlobalFoundries.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.