IBM Research scientist Nicolas Loubet holds a wafer of chips with 5nm silicon nanosheet transistors manufactured using an industry-first process that can deliver 40 percent performance enhancement at fixed power, or 75 percent power savings at matched performance.
In this video, Nicolas Loubet from IBM Research describes how IBM’s new 5 nanometer transistors will provide huge power savings that could enable mobile devices to run for days without a charge.
“IBM and its Research Alliance partners GLOBALFOUNDRIES and Samsung have developed a first-of-a-kind process to build silicon nanosheet transistors that will enable 5 nanometer chips. The resulting increase in performance will help accelerate cognitive computing, the Internet of Things (IoT) and other data-intensive applications delivered in the cloud.”
At the IBM Research Blog, Huiming Bu writes that 5 nm could only by changing and rearranging the elements of a chip.
We stacked layers of silicon nanosheets together, horizontally, in order for this new architecture to enable our 5nm transistor to deliver the power and performance boost future applications will demand. The change from today’s vertical architecture to horizontal layers of silicon opened a fourth “gate” on the transistor that enabled electrical signals to pass through and between other transistors on a chip. At these dimensions, it means that those signals are passing through a switch that’s no larger than the width of two to three DNA strands, side-by-side.”
More ways to send a signal on more 5nm transistors equates to a 40 percent performance improvement over 10nm chips, using the same amount of power; or a 75 percent power savings, at the same performance level.
Bu goes on to say that a future 5nm node chip with nanosheet transistors, and its scaled density, will deliver the expected value of performance, power, and economy.
At IBM, we think years ahead about what cognitive computing, cloud computing, blockchain, mobile, and security advances should be able to do – and what will make running those algorithms, and apps possible. We believe that billions of 5nm nanosheet transistors will soon serve as the silicon engine for these capabilities.
