IBM showcased the world’s first 2nm chip

IBM announced that it has manufactured the world’s first 2nm process node wafer and demonstrated a complete 300mm wafer produced by the 2nm process at its Albany, New York factory. However, this does not mean that the 2nm process has achieved mass production. In any case, this is also a breakthrough in semiconductor design and manufacturing, a qualitative leap in performance and energy efficiency. IBM believes that the potential advantages of 2nm wafers include improving the battery life of mobile phones, reducing carbon emissions in data centers, allowing notebook computers to have more and faster functions, and helping to improve the performance of self-driving car chips.

A 2 nm wafer fabricated at IBM Research’s Albany facility. The wafer contains hundreds of individual chips. Courtesy of IBM

According to IBM, this technology can put “50 billion transistors on a fingernail-sized chip“. Compared with the current 7nm process, under the same power consumption, its performance will be 45% higher, or under the same performance, power consumption will be reduced by 75%.

The potential benefits of these advanced 2 nm chips could include:

• Quadrupling cell phone battery life, only requiring users to charge their devices every four days.
• Slashing the carbon footprint of data centers, which account for one percent of global energy use. Changing all of their servers to 2 nm-based processors could potentially reduce that number significantly.
• Drastically speeding up a laptop’s functions, ranging from quicker processing in applications, to assisting in language translation more easily, to faster internet access.
• Contributing to faster object detection and reaction time in autonomous vehicles like self-driving cars.

IBM plans to use its first commercial 7nm process processor IBM Power 10 in its Power Systems servers this year, supporting PCIe Gen5 and DDR5 memory, using a process developed in cooperation with Samsung, which will be manufactured by Samsung.