Incredible breakthrough with little immediate results

Jul 9, 2015 14:12 GMT  ·  By

After selling its semiconductor facilities to Global Foundries, IBM still manages to push forward its research in microchip manufacturing.

Today the company announced the first test silicon on the 7nm process node. This major breakthrough shows the major expertise IBM still has and how important all the patents IBM gets to sell to other companies are, the way it happened with Global Foundries.

The new process nodes were built in partnership with GlobalFoundries, Samsung, and IBM’s equipment providers at the SUNY Polytechnic Institute’s College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering. IBM managed to set a first not only in 7nm chip manufacturing but also in using Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography (EUV) and silicon germanium (SiGe).

Looking at what the competition is working on right now, it is easy to see how IBM managed to beat them to the punch. Intel is working right now at the 22nm an 14nm process node while AMD has abandoned the 20nm from TSMC and will work with Global Foundries for the upcoming 14nm FinFET solution.

Still, two incredible breakthroughs have been made by IBM in one shot when it managed to develop the 7nm. First it used the silicon germanium for better performance compared with the insufficient one given by silicon alone, and secondly, the use of EUV printing technology which in itself is very much still an experimental manufacturing technology.

The challenge is still out there

To actually harness Ultraviolet light bombardment, powerful lasers on ionized silicon germanium must be developed to reach at microscopic levels a power output of 100W. Although this sort of energy output has never been reached, the TSMC foundries in Taiwan managed to achieve a stable 90W sustained average power to actually use EUV with relative reliability.

However, issues still remain with this experimental 7nm production as it's very difficult to actually maintain such powerful microscopic lasers that can consume about 40 kW to burn through an ionized silicon germanium chip.

However, it's believed that a sustained mass production of such chips will come only in a couple of years time as the technology for this is still difficult to harness.

Right now, IBM's most advanced chips, based on the POWER8 architecture are manufactured at the 22nm node. Although IBM has leapfrogged its development cycle, ExtremeTech believes it's quite possible to see the new nodes on future POWER9+ or POWER10 in 2017 or 2019 when sustainable EUV manufacturing technology becomes stable enough to mass produce the 7nm.