IBM’s invention of nanosheet technology has demonstrated scaling to the 2 nanometer node, with a world-record gate length just 2 dozen atoms long. This breakthrough enables 45% faster speed or 75% less power as compared to the best available 7 nm transistors, extending the semiconductor roadmap for the coming decade. Supercomputers, mobile phones, autonomous vehicles and health care devices using nanosheet will be more energy efficient and enable richer functionality than today’s technology.
Semiconductor industry has been the harbor of technology advancement in our society ever since VLSI began in 1970s. At the heart of the semiconductor technology innovation is transistor – a three terminal device architecture has been the workhorse in VLSI since its invention in 1947. The whole industry has been following a trend line to approximately double the number of transistors on a chip every two years, so called Moore’s law in the past five decades. In 2011, a FinFET transistor architecture was introduced as a major breakthrough to enable device scaling beyond a planar transistor, providing reduced leakage and improved performance – and has since maintained as mainstream device. Based on more than a decade of fundamental research and development work, IBM has recently demonstrated a new transistor architecture called Nanosheet, which is a Gate-All-Around (GAA) device enabling next decade of scaling beyond FinFETs.
Tags: Semiconductor, Technology, Chip, Transistor, Nanosheet