IBM And Samsung Jointly Develop New Semiconductor Design

Jan, 2022 - By SMI

The new semiconductor chip made from vertical transistor architecture could be used in smartphones to run them for a week or more without recharging.

IBM and Samsung together developed a new chip design for semiconductor that could allow smartphones to run for a week or more without needing to recharge. The new architecture uses vertical transistors that allow currents to flow vertically, which would help to develop more compact devices, creating a way for smartphones that run for longer time on one charge, unlike current devices.

IBM unveiled semiconductor chips consisting smallest transistors only 2 nanometers wide, which is smaller than a DNA stand in May 2021.  It allowed the company to build a 50 billion transistors on a chip with a size of a fingernail, significantly increasing efficiency and performance offering 75% decrease in the use of energy compared to regular chip of 7 nanometer transistors. The novel architecture created by IBM and Samsung, named as Vertical Transport Field Effect Transistors (VTFET) involves vertical transistors built on the chip allowing the electric current to pass up instead of down. As reported by IBM, the new vertical structure enables packing of more transistors into the space and drives the contact points between these transistors to propel flow of the current saving the energy.

IBM further reported that the new design can increase the performance of current industry solutions, and it could reduce the use of energy by 85%. The company has created tests chips using this novel architecture VTFET that could be used in various other applications. According to the company, these chips could be used in devices such as autonomous vehicles, and ocean buoys allowing them run on minimum energy. Moreover, it could also be used in energy-intensive computing process such as mining of cryptocurrency reducing its carbon footprint.