IBM announced that it has achieved the world’s first 2nm chip technology. The company says that its process is “projected to achieve 45 percent higher performance, or 75 percent lower energy use, than today's most advanced 7nm node chips”.
IBM says that its 2nm process allows it to have 50 billion transistors on a chip that is around the size of a finger nail, with a blog post revealing that technology made use of the Gate-All-Around (GAA) nanosheet device architecture. Anandtech reported that the new 2nm chip has a transistor density of 333 million transistors per square millimeter (Mtr/mm2).
While IBM has claimed to be the first to make the 2nm breakthrough, it acknowledged that it was “still several years away from manufacturing of 2nm node devices”. According to Axios, IBM’s new 2nm process is “still a couple years from being ready for full-scale manufacturing”.
As for what other companies are doing in terms of moving beyond the 5nm process, TSMC will roll out its 3nm process in 2022 (via Anandtech), while Samsung will kick off 3nm chip production in 2022 after COVID-19-related delays (via 91mobiles). Meanwhile, Intel is still working on 7nm chips, which will be released in 2023 (via PC Gamer).
