Tag Archives: GLOBALFOUNDRIES

7nm (nanometre) chip shakeup

From time to time I check out the latest on attempts to shrink computer chips. In my July 11, 2014 posting I noted IBM’s announcement about developing a 7nm computer chip and later in my July 15, 2015 posting I noted IBM’s announcement of a working 7nm chip (from a July 9, 2015 IBM news release , “The breakthrough, accomplished in partnership with GLOBALFOUNDRIES and Samsung at SUNY Polytechnic Institute’s Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (SUNY Poly CNSE), could result in the ability to place more than 20 billion tiny switches — transistors — on the fingernail-sized chips that power everything from smartphones to spacecraft.”

I’m not sure what happened to the IBM/Global Foundries/Samsung partnership but Global Foundries recently announced that it will no longer be working on 7nm chips. From an August 27, 2018 Global Foundries news release,

GLOBALFOUNDRIES [GF] today announced an important step in its transformation, continuing the trajectory launched with the appointment of Tom Caulfield as CEO earlier this year. In line with the strategic direction Caulfield has articulated, GF is reshaping its technology portfolio to intensify its focus on delivering truly differentiated offerings for clients in high-growth markets.

GF is realigning its leading-edge FinFET roadmap to serve the next wave of clients that will adopt the technology in the coming years. The company will shift development resources to make its 14/12nm FinFET platform more relevant to these clients, delivering a range of innovative IP and features including RF, embedded memory, low power and more. To support this transition, GF is putting its 7nm FinFET program on hold indefinitely [emphasis mine] and restructuring its research and development teams to support its enhanced portfolio initiatives. This will require a workforce reduction, however a significant number of top technologists will be redeployed on 14/12nm FinFET derivatives and other differentiated offerings.

I tried to find a definition for FinFet but the reference to a MOSFET and in-gate transistors was too much incomprehensible information packed into a tight space, see the FinFET Wikipedia entry for more, if you dare.

Getting back to the 7nm chip issue, Samuel K. Moore (I don’t think he’s related to the Moore of Moore’s law) wrote an Aug. 28, 2018 posting on the Nanoclast blog (on the IEEE [Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers] website) which provides some insight (Note: Links have been removed),

In a major shift in strategy, GlobalFoundries is halting its development of next-generation chipmaking processes. It had planned to move to the so-called 7-nm node, then begin to use extreme-ultraviolet lithography (EUV) to make that process cheaper. From there, it planned to develop even more advanced lithography that would allow for 5- and 3-nanometer nodes. Despite having installed at least one EUV machine at its Fab 8 facility in Malta, N.Y., all those plans are now on indefinite hold, the company announced Monday.

The move leaves only three companies reaching for the highest rungs of the Moore’s Law ladder: Intel, Samsung, and TSMC.

It’s a huge turnabout for GlobalFoundries. …

GlobalFoundries rationale for the move is that there are not enough customers that need bleeding-edge 7-nm processes to make it profitable. “While the leading edge gets most of the headlines, fewer customers can afford the transition to 7 nm and finer geometries,” said Samuel Wang, research vice president at Gartner, in a GlobalFoundries press release.

“The vast majority of today’s fabless [emphasis mine] customers are looking to get more value out of each technology generation to leverage the substantial investments required to design into each technology node,” explained GlobalFoundries CEO Tom Caulfield in a press release. “Essentially, these nodes are transitioning to design platforms serving multiple waves of applications, giving each node greater longevity. This industry dynamic has resulted in fewer fabless clients designing into the outer limits of Moore’s Law. We are shifting our resources and focus by doubling down on our investments in differentiated technologies across our entire portfolio that are most relevant to our clients in growing market segments.”

(The dynamic Caulfield describes is something the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Agency is working to disrupt with its $1.5-billion Electronics Resurgence Initiative. Darpa’s [DARPA] partners are trying to collapse the cost of design and allow older process nodes to keep improving by using 3D technology.)

Fabless manufacturing is where the fabrication is outsourced and the manufacturing company of record is focused on other matters according to the Fabless manufacturing Wikipedia entry.

Roland Moore-Colyer (I don’t think he’s related to Moore of Moore’s law either) has written August 28, 2018 article for theinquirer.net which also explores this latest news from Global Foundries (Note: Links have been removed),

EVER PREPPED A SPREAD for a party to then have less than half the people you were expecting show up? That’s probably how GlobalFoundries [sic] feels at the moment.

The chip manufacturer, which was once part of AMD, had a fabrication process geared up for 7-nanometre chips which its customers – including AMD and Qualcomm – were expected to adopt.

But AMD has confirmed that it’s decided to move its 7nm GPU production to TSMC, and Intel is still stuck trying to make chips based on 10nm fabrication.

Arguably, this could mark a stymieing of innovation and cutting-edge designs for chips in the near future. But with processors like AMD’s Threadripper 2990WX overclocked to run at 6GHz across all its 32 cores, in the real-world PC fans have no need to worry about consumer chips running out of puff anytime soon. µ

That’s all folks.

Maybe that’s not all

Steve Blank in a Sept. 10, 2018 posting on the Nanoclast blog (on the IEEE [Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers] website) provides some provocative commentary on the Global Foundries announcement (Note: A link has been removed),

For most of our lives, the idea that computers and technology would get better, faster, and cheaper every year was as assured as the sun rising every morning. The story “GlobalFoundries Halts 7-nm Chip Development”  doesn’t sound like the end of that era, but for you and anyone who uses an electronic device, it most certainly is.

Technology innovation is going to take a different direction.

This story just goes on and on

There was a new development according to a Sept. 12, 2018 posting on the Nanoclast blog by, again, Samuel K. Moore (Note Links have been removed),

At an event today [sept. 12, 2018], Apple executives said that the new iPhone Xs and Xs Max will contain the first smartphone processor to be made using 7 nm manufacturing technology, the most advanced process node. Huawei made the same claim, to less fanfare, late last month and it’s unclear who really deserves the accolades. If anybody does, it’s TSMC, which manufactures both chips.

TSMC went into volume production with 7-nm tech in April, and rival Samsung is moving toward commercial 7-nm production later this year or in early 2019. GlobalFoundries recently abandoned its attempts to develop a 7 nm process, reasoning that the multibillion-dollar investment would never pay for itself. And Intel announced delays in its move to its next manufacturing technology, which it calls a 10-nm node but which may be equivalent to others’ 7-nm technology.

There’s a certain ‘soap opera’ quality to this with all the twists and turns.

Memristors at Masdar

The Masdar Institute of Science and Technology (Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; Masdar Institute Wikipedia entry) featured its work with memristors in an Oct. 1, 2017 Masdar Institute press release by Erica Solomon (for anyone who’s interested, I have a simple description of memristors and links to more posts about them after the press release),

Researchers Develop New Memristor Prototype Capable of Performing Complex Operations at High-Speed and Low Power, Could Lead to Advancements in Internet of Things, Portable Healthcare Sensing and other Embedded Technologies

Computer circuits in development at the Khalifa University of Science and Technology could make future computers much more compact, efficient and powerful thanks to advancements being made in memory technologies that combine processing and memory storage functions into one densely packed “memristor.”

Enabling faster, smaller and ultra-low-power computers with memristors could have a big impact on embedded technologies, which enable Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence, and portable healthcare sensing systems, says Dr. Baker Mohammad, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Dr. Mohammad co-authored a book on memristor technologies, which has just been released by Springer, a leading global scientific publisher of books and journals, with Class of 2017 PhD graduate Heba Abunahla. The book, titled Memristor Technology: Synthesis and Modeling for Sensing and Security Applications, provides readers with a single-source guide to fabricate, characterize and model memristor devices for sensing applications.

The pair also contributed to a paper on memristor research that was published in IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers earlier this month with Class of 2017 MSc graduate Muath Abu Lebdeh and Dr. Mahmoud Al-Qutayri, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.PhD student Yasmin Halawani is also an active member of Dr. Mohammad’s research team.

Conventional computers rely on energy and time-consuming processes to move information back and forth between the computer central processing unit (CPU) and the memory, which are separately located. A memristor, which is an electrical resistor that remembers how much current flows through it, can bridge the gap between computation and storage. Instead of fetching data from the memory and sending that data to the CPU where it is then processed, memristors have the potential to store and process data simultaneously.

“Memristors allow computers to perform many operations at the same time without having to move data around, thereby reducing latency, energy requirements, costs and chip size,” Dr. Mohammad explained. “We are focused on extending the logic gate design of the current memristor architecture with one that leads to even greater reduction of latency, energy dissipation and size.”

Logic gates control an electronics logical operation on one or more binary inputs and typically produce a single binary output. That is why they are at the heart of what makes a computer work, allowing a CPU to carry out a given set of instructions, which are received as electrical signals, using one or a combination of the seven basic logical operations: AND, OR, NOT, XOR, XNOR, NAND and NOR.

The team’s latest work is aimed at advancing a memristor’s ability to perform a complex logic operation, known as the XNOR (Exclusive NOR) logic gate function, which is the most complex logic gate operation among the seven basic logic gates types.

Designing memristive logic gates is difficult, as they require that each electrical input and output be in the form of electrical resistance rather than electrical voltage.

“However, we were able to successfully design an XNOR logic gate prototype with a novel structure, by layering bipolar and unipolar memristor types in a novel heterogeneous structure, which led to a reduction in latency and energy consumption for a memristive XNOR logic circuit gate by 50% compared to state-of the art state full logic proposed by leading research institutes,” Dr. Mohammad revealed.

The team’s current work builds on five years of research in the field of memristors, which is expected to reach a market value of US$384 million by 2025, according to a recent report from Research and Markets. Up to now, the team has fabricated and characterized several memristor prototypes, assessing how different design structures influence efficiency and inform potential applications. Some innovative memristor technology applications the team discovered include machine vision, radiation sensing and diabetes detection. Two patents have already been issued by the US Patents and Trademark Office (USPTO) for novel memristor designs invented by the team, with two additional patents pending.

Their robust research efforts have also led to the publication of several papers on the technology in high impact journals, including The Journal of Physical Chemistry, Materials Chemistry and Physics, and IEEE TCAS. This strong technology base paved the way for undergraduate senior students Reem Aldahmani, Amani Alshkeili, and Reem Jassem Jaffar to build novel and efficient memristive sensing prototypes.

The memristor research is also set to get an additional boost thanks to the new University merger, which Dr. Mohammad believes could help expedite the team’s research and development efforts through convenient and continuous access to the wider range of specialized facilities and tools the new university has on offer.

The team’s prototype memristors are now in the laboratory prototype stage, and Dr. Mohammad plans to initiate discussions for internal partnership opportunities with the Khalifa University Robotics Institute, followed by external collaboration with leading semiconductor companies such as Abu Dhabi-owned GlobalFoundries, to accelerate the transfer of his team’s technology to the market.

With initial positive findings and the promise of further development through the University’s enhanced portfolio of research facilities, this project is a perfect demonstration of how the Khalifa University of Science and Technology is pushing the envelope of electronics and semiconductor technologies to help transform Abu Dhabi into a high-tech hub for research and entrepreneurship.

h/t Oct. 4, 2017 Nanowerk news item

Slightly restating it from the press release, a memristor is a nanoscale electrical component which mimics neural plasticity. Memristor combines the word ‘memory’ with ‘resistor’.

For those who’d like a little more, there are three components: capacitors, inductors, and resistors which make up an electrical circuit. The resistor is the circuit element which represents the resistance to the flow of electric current.  As for how this relates to the memristor (from the Memristor Wikipedia entry; Note: Links have been removed),

The memristor’s electrical resistance is not constant but depends on the history of current that had previously flowed through the device, i.e., its present resistance depends on how much electric charge has flowed in what direction through it in the past; the device remembers its history — the so-called non-volatility property.[2] When the electric power supply is turned off, the memristor remembers its most recent resistance until it is turned on again

The memristor could lead to more energy-saving devices but much of the current (pun noted) interest lies in its similarity to neural plasticity and its potential application on neuromorphic engineering (brainlike computing).

Here’s a sampling of some of the more recent memristor postings on this blog:

August 24, 2017: Neuristors and brainlike computing

June 28, 2017: Dr. Wei Lu and bio-inspired ‘memristor’ chips

May 2, 2017: Predicting how a memristor functions

December 30, 2016: Changing synaptic connectivity with a memristor

December 5, 2016: The memristor as computing device

November 1, 2016: The memristor as the ‘missing link’ in bioelectronic medicine?

You can find more by using ‘memristor’ as the search term in the blog search function or on the search engine of your choice.

IBM and a 5 nanometre chip

If this continues, they’re going to have change the scale from nano to pico. IBM has announced work on a 5 nanometre (5nm) chip in a June 5, 2017 news item on Nanotechnology Now,

IBM (NYSE: IBM), its Research Alliance partners GLOBALFOUNDRIES and Samsung, and equipment suppliers have developed an industry-first process to build silicon nanosheet transistors that will enable 5 nanometer (nm) chips. The details of the process will be presented at the 2017 Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits conference in Kyoto, Japan. In less than two years since developing a 7nm test node chip with 20 billion transistors, scientists have paved the way for 30 billion switches on a fingernail-sized chip.

A June 5, 2017 IBM news release, which originated the news item, spells out some of the details about IBM’s latest breakthrough,

The resulting increase in performance will help accelerate cognitive computing [emphasis mine], the Internet of Things (IoT), and other data-intensive applications delivered in the cloud. The power savings could also mean that the batteries in smartphones and other mobile products could last two to three times longer than today’s devices, before needing to be charged.

Scientists working as part of the IBM-led Research Alliance at the SUNY Polytechnic Institute Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Engineering’s NanoTech Complex in Albany, NY achieved the breakthrough by using stacks of silicon nanosheets as the device structure of the transistor, instead of the standard FinFET architecture, which is the blueprint for the semiconductor industry up through 7nm node technology.

“For business and society to meet the demands of cognitive and cloud computing in the coming years, advancement in semiconductor technology is essential,” said Arvind Krishna, senior vice president, Hybrid Cloud, and director, IBM Research. “That’s why IBM aggressively pursues new and different architectures and materials that push the limits of this industry, and brings them to market in technologies like mainframes and our cognitive systems.”

The silicon nanosheet transistor demonstration, as detailed in the Research Alliance paper Stacked Nanosheet Gate-All-Around Transistor to Enable Scaling Beyond FinFET, and published by VLSI, proves that 5nm chips are possible, more powerful, and not too far off in the future.

Compared to the leading edge 10nm technology available in the market, a nanosheet-based 5nm technology can deliver 40 percent performance enhancement at fixed power, or 75 percent power savings at matched performance. This improvement enables a significant boost to meeting the future demands of artificial intelligence (AI) systems, virtual reality and mobile devices.

Building a New Switch

“This announcement is the latest example of the world-class research that continues to emerge from our groundbreaking public-private partnership in New York,” said Gary Patton, CTO and Head of Worldwide R&D at GLOBALFOUNDRIES. “As we make progress toward commercializing 7nm in 2018 at our Fab 8 manufacturing facility, we are actively pursuing next-generation technologies at 5nm and beyond to maintain technology leadership and enable our customers to produce a smaller, faster, and more cost efficient generation of semiconductors.”

IBM Research has explored nanosheet semiconductor technology for more than 10 years. This work is the first in the industry to demonstrate the feasibility to design and fabricate stacked nanosheet devices with electrical properties superior to FinFET architecture.

This same Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography approach used to produce the 7nm test node and its 20 billion transistors was applied to the nanosheet transistor architecture. Using EUV lithography, the width of the nanosheets can be adjusted continuously, all within a single manufacturing process or chip design. This adjustability permits the fine-tuning of performance and power for specific circuits – something not possible with today’s FinFET transistor architecture production, which is limited by its current-carrying fin height. Therefore, while FinFET chips can scale to 5nm, simply reducing the amount of space between fins does not provide increased current flow for additional performance.

“Today’s announcement continues the public-private model collaboration with IBM that is energizing SUNY-Polytechnic’s, Albany’s, and New York State’s leadership and innovation in developing next generation technologies,” said Dr. Bahgat Sammakia, Interim President, SUNY Polytechnic Institute. “We believe that enabling the first 5nm transistor is a significant milestone for the entire semiconductor industry as we continue to push beyond the limitations of our current capabilities. SUNY Poly’s partnership with IBM and Empire State Development is a perfect example of how Industry, Government and Academia can successfully collaborate and have a broad and positive impact on society.”

Part of IBM’s $3 billion, five-year investment in chip R&D (announced in 2014), the proof of nanosheet architecture scaling to a 5nm node continues IBM’s legacy of historic contributions to silicon and semiconductor innovation. They include the invention or first implementation of the single cell DRAM, the Dennard Scaling Laws, chemically amplified photoresists, copper interconnect wiring, Silicon on Insulator, strained engineering, multi core microprocessors, immersion lithography, high speed SiGe, High-k gate dielectrics, embedded DRAM, 3D chip stacking and Air gap insulators.

I last wrote about IBM and computer chips in a July 15, 2015 posting regarding their 7nm chip. You may want to scroll down approximately 55% of the way where I note research from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) about metal nanoparticles with unexpected properties possibly having an impact on nanoelectronics.

Getting back to IBM, they have produced a slick video about their 5nm chip breakthrough,

Meanwhile, Katherine Bourzac provides technical detail in a June 5, 2017 posting on the Nanoclast blog (on the IEEE [Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers] website), Note: A link has been removed,

Researchers at IBM believe the future of the transistor is in stacked nanosheets. …

Today’s state-of-the-art transistor is the finFET, named for the fin-like ridges of current-carrying silicon that project from the chip’s surface. The silicon fins are surrounded on their three exposed sides by a structure called the gate. The gate switches the flow of current on, and prevents electrons from leaking out when the transistor is off. This design is expected to last from this year’s bleeding-edge process technology, the “10-nanometer” node, through the next node, 7 nanometers. But any smaller, and these transistors will become difficult to switch off: electrons will leak out, even with the three-sided gates.

So the semiconductor industry has been working on alternatives for the upcoming 5 nanometer node. One popular idea is to use lateral silicon nanowires that are completely surrounded by the gate, preventing electron leaks and saving power. This design is called “gate all around.” IBM’s new design is a variation on this. In their test chips, each transistor is made up of three stacked horizontal sheets of silicon, each only a few nanometers thick and completely surrounded by a gate.

Why a sheet instead of a wire? Huiming Bu, director of silicon integration and devices at IBM, says nanosheets can bring back one of the benefits of pre-finFET, planar designs. Designers used to be able to vary the width of a transistor to prioritize fast operations or energy efficiency. Varying the amount of silicon in a finFET transistor is not practicable because it would mean making some fins taller and other shorter. Fins must all be the same height due to manufacturing constraints, says Bu.

IBM’s nanosheets can range from 8 to 50 nanometers in width. “Wider gives you better performance but takes more power, smaller width relaxes performance but reduces power use,” says Bu. This will allow circuit designers to pick and choose what they need, whether they are making a power efficient mobile chip processor or designing a bank of SRAM memory. “We are bringing flexibility back to the designers,” he says.

The test chips have 30 billion transistors. …

It was a struggle trying to edit Bourzac’s posting with its good detail and clear writing. I encourage you to read it (June 5, 2017 posting) in its entirety.

As for where this drive downwards to the ‘ever smaller’ is going, there’s Dexter’s Johnson’s June 29, 2017 posting about another IBM team’s research on his Nanoclast blog on the IEEE website (Note: Links have been removed),

There have been increasing signs coming from the research community that carbon nanotubes are beginning to step up to the challenge of offering a real alternative to silicon-based complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) transistors.

Now, researchers at IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center have advanced carbon nanotube-based transistors another step toward meeting the demands of the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) for the next decade. The IBM researchers have fabricated a p-channel transistor based on carbon nanotubes that takes up less than half the space of leading silicon technologies while operating at a lower voltage.

In research described in the journal Science, the IBM scientists used a carbon nanotube p-channel to reduce the transistor footprint; their transistor contains all components to 40 square nanometers [emphasis mine], an ITRS roadmap benchmark for ten years out.

One of the keys to being able to reduce the transistor to such a small size is the use of the carbon nanotube as the channel in place of silicon. The nanotube is only 1 nanometer thick. Such thinness offers a significant advantage in electrostatics, so that it’s possible to reduce the device gate length to 10 nanometers without seeing the device performance adversely affected by short-channel effects. An additional benefit of the nanotubes is that the electrons travel much faster, which contributes to a higher level of device performance.

Happy reading!

Cities as incubators of technological and economic growth: from the rustbelt to the brainbelt

An April 10, 2016 news article by Xumei Dong on the timesunion website casts a light on what some feel is an emerging ‘brainbelt’ (Note: Links have been removed),

Albany [New York state, US], in the forefront of nanotechnology research, is one of the fastest-growing cities for tech jobs, according to a new book exploring hot spots of innovation across the globe.

“You have GlobalFoundries, which has thousands of employees working in one of the most modern plants in the world,” says Antoine van Agtmael, the Dutch-born investor who wrote “The Smartest Places on Earth: Why Rustbelts Are the Emerging Hotspots of Global Innovation” with Dutch journalist Fred Bakker.

Their book, mentioned in a Brookings Institution panel discussion last week [April 6, 2016], lists Albany as a leading innovation hub — part of an emerging “brainbelt” in the United States.

The Brookings Institute’s The smartest places on Earth: Why rustbelts are the emerging hotspots of global innovation event page provides more details and includes an embedded video of the event (running time: roughly 1 hour 17 mins.), Note: A link has been removed,

The conventional wisdom in manufacturing has long held that the key to maintaining a competitive edge lies in making things as cheaply as possible, which saw production outsourced to the developing world in pursuit of ever-lower costs. In contradiction to that prevailing wisdom, authors Antoine van Agtmael, a Brookings trustee, and Fred Bakker crisscrossed the globe and found that the economic tide is beginning to shift from its obsession with cheap goods to the production of smart ones.

Their new book, “The Smartest Places on Earth” (PublicAffairs, 2016), examines this changing dynamic and the transformation of “rustbelt” cities, the former industrial centers of the U.S. and Europe, into a “brainbelt” of design and innovation.

On Wednesday, April 6 [2016] Centennial Scholar Bruce Katz and the Metropolitan Policy Program hosted an event discussing these emerging hotspots and how cities such as Akron, Albany, Raleigh-Durham, Minneapolis-St.Paul, and Portland in the United States, and Eindhoven, Malmo, Dresden, and Oulu in Europe are seizing the initiative and recovering their economic strength.

You can find the book here or if a summary and biographies of the authors will suffice, there’s this,

The remarkable story of how rustbelt cities such as Akron and Albany in the United States and Eindhoven in Europe are becoming the unlikely hotspots of global innovation, where sharing brainpower and making things smarter—not cheaper—is creating a new economy that is turning globalization on its head

Antoine van Agtmael and Fred Bakker counter recent conventional wisdom that the American and northern European economies have lost their initiative in innovation and their competitive edge by focusing on an unexpected and hopeful trend: the emerging sources of economic strength coming from areas once known as “rustbelts” that had been written off as yesterday’s story.

In these communities, a combination of forces—visionary thinkers, local universities, regional government initiatives, start-ups, and big corporations—have created “brainbelts.” Based on trust, a collaborative style of working, and freedom of thinking prevalent in America and Europe, these brainbelts are producing smart products that are transforming industries by integrating IT, sensors, big data, new materials, new discoveries, and automation. From polymers to medical devices, the brainbelts have turned the tide from cheap, outsourced production to making things smart right in our own backyard. The next emerging market may, in fact, be the West.

about Antoine van Agtmael and Fred Bakker

Antoine van Agtmael is senior adviser at Garten Rothkopf, a public policy advisory firm in Washington, DC. He was a founder, CEO, and CIO of Emerging Markets Management LLC; previously he was deputy director of the capital markets department of the International Finance Corporation (“IFC”), the private sector oriented affiliate of the World Bank, and a division chief in the World Bank’s borrowing operations. He was an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law Center and taught at the Harvard Institute of Politics. Mr. van Agtmael is chairman of the NPR Foundation, a member of the board of NPR, and chairman of its Investment Committee. He is also a trustee of The Brookings Institution and cochairman of its International Advisory Council. He is on the President’s Council on International Activities at Yale University, the Advisory Council of Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations

Alfred Bakker, until his recent retirement, was a journalist specializing in monetary and financial affairs with Het Financieele Dagblad, the “Financial Times of Holland,” serving as deputy editor, editor-in-chief and CEO. In addition to his writing and editing duties he helped develop the company from a newspaper publisher to a multimedia company, developing several websites, a business news radio channel, and a quarterly business magazine, FD Outlook, and, responsible for the establishment of FD Intelligence

A hard cover copy of the book is $25.99, presumably US currency.

IBM and its working 7nm test chip

I wrote abut IBM and its plans for a 7nm computer chip last year in a July 11, 2014 posting, which featured IBM and mention of HP Labs and other company’s plans for shrinking their computer chips. Almost one year later, IBM has announced, in a July 9, 2015 IBM news release on PRnewswire.com the accomplishment of a working 7nm test chip,

An alliance led by IBM Research (NYSE: IBM) today announced that it has produced the semiconductor industry’s first 7nm (nanometer) node test chips with functioning transistors.  The breakthrough, accomplished in partnership with GLOBALFOUNDRIES and Samsung at SUNY Polytechnic Institute’s Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (SUNY Poly CNSE), could result in the ability to place more than 20 billion tiny switches — transistors — on the fingernail-sized chips that power everything from smartphones to spacecraft.

To achieve the higher performance, lower power and scaling benefits promised by 7nm technology, researchers had to bypass conventional semiconductor manufacturing approaches. Among the novel processes and techniques pioneered by the IBM Research alliance were a number of industry-first innovations, most notably Silicon Germanium (SiGe) channel transistors and Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography integration at multiple levels.

Industry experts consider 7nm technology crucial to meeting the anticipated demands of future cloud computing and Big Data systems, cognitive computing, mobile products and other emerging technologies. Part of IBM’s $3 billion, five-year investment in chip R&D (announced in 2014), this accomplishment was made possible through a unique public-private partnership with New York State and joint development alliance with GLOBALFOUNDRIES, Samsung and equipment suppliers. The team is based at SUNY Poly’s NanoTech Complex in Albany [New York state].

“For business and society to get the most out of tomorrow’s computers and devices, scaling to 7nm and beyond is essential,” said Arvind Krishna, senior vice president and director of IBM Research. “That’s why IBM has remained committed to an aggressive basic research agenda that continually pushes the limits of semiconductor technology. Working with our partners, this milestone builds on decades of research that has set the pace for the microelectronics industry, and positions us to advance our leadership for years to come.”

Microprocessors utilizing 22nm and 14nm technology power today’s servers, cloud data centers and mobile devices, and 10nm technology is well on the way to becoming a mature technology. The IBM Research-led alliance achieved close to 50 percent area scaling improvements over today’s most advanced technology, introduced SiGe channel material for transistor performance enhancement at 7nm node geometries, process innovations to stack them below 30nm pitch and full integration of EUV lithography at multiple levels. These techniques and scaling could result in at least a 50 percent power/performance improvement for next generation mainframe and POWER systems that will power the Big Data, cloud and mobile era.

“Governor Andrew Cuomo’s trailblazing public-private partnership model is catalyzing historic innovation and advancement. Today’s [July 8, 2015] announcement is just one example of our collaboration with IBM, which furthers New York State’s global leadership in developing next generation technologies,” said Dr. Michael Liehr, SUNY Poly Executive Vice President of Innovation and Technology and Vice President of Research.  “Enabling the first 7nm node transistors is a significant milestone for the entire semiconductor industry as we continue to push beyond the limitations of our current capabilities.”

“Today’s announcement marks the latest achievement in our long history of collaboration to accelerate development of next-generation technology,” said Gary Patton, CTO and Head of Worldwide R&D at GLOBALFOUNDRIES. “Through this joint collaborative program based at the Albany NanoTech Complex, we are able to maintain our focus on technology leadership for our clients and partners by helping to address the development challenges central to producing a smaller, faster, more cost efficient generation of semiconductors.”

The 7nm node milestone continues IBM’s legacy of historic contributions to silicon and semiconductor innovation. They include the invention or first implementation of the single cell DRAM, the Dennard Scaling Laws, chemically amplified photoresists, copper interconnect wiring, Silicon on Insulator, strained engineering, multi core microprocessors, immersion lithography, high speed SiGe, High-k gate dielectrics, embedded DRAM, 3D chip stacking and Air gap insulators.

In 2014, they were talking about carbon nanotubes with regard to the 7nm chip, this shift to silicon germanium is interesting.

Sebastian Anthony in a July 9, 2015 article for Ars Technica offers some intriguing insight into the accomplishment and the technology (Note: A link has been removed),

… While it should be stressed that commercial 7nm chips remain at least two years away, this test chip from IBM and its partners is extremely significant for three reasons: it’s a working sub-10nm chip (this is pretty significant in itself); it’s the first commercially viable sub-10nm FinFET logic chip that uses silicon-germanium as the channel material; and it appears to be the first commercially viable design produced with extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography.

Technologically, SiGe and EUV are both very significant. SiGe has higher electron mobility than pure silicon, which makes it better suited for smaller transistors. The gap between two silicon nuclei is about 0.5nm; as the gate width gets ever smaller (about 7nm in this case), the channel becomes so small that the handful of silicon atoms can’t carry enough current. By mixing some germanium into the channel, electron mobility increases, and adequate current can flow. Silicon generally runs into problems at sub-10nm nodes, and we can expect Intel and TSMC to follow a similar path to IBM, GlobalFoundries, and Samsung (aka the Common Platform alliance).

EUV lithography is an more interesting innovation. Basically, as chip features get smaller, you need a narrower beam of light to etch those features accurately, or you need to use multiple patterning (which we won’t go into here). The current state of the art for lithography is a 193nm ArF (argon fluoride) laser; that is, the wavelength is 193nm wide. Complex optics and multiple painstaking steps are required to etch 14nm features using a 193nm light source. EUV has a wavelength of just 13.5nm, which will handily take us down into the sub-10nm realm, but so far it has proven very difficult and expensive to deploy commercially (it has been just around the corner for quite a few years now).

If you’re interested in the nuances, I recommend reading Anthony’s article in its entirety.

One final comment, there was no discussion of electrodes or other metallic components associated with computer chips. The metallic components are a topic of some interest to me (anyway), given some research published by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) last year. From my Oct. 14, 2014 posting,

Research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has revealed a new property of metal nanoparticles, in this case, silver. From an Oct. 12, 2014 news item on ScienceDaily,

A surprising phenomenon has been found in metal nanoparticles: They appear, from the outside, to be liquid droplets, wobbling and readily changing shape, while their interiors retain a perfectly stable crystal configuration.

The research team behind the finding, led by MIT professor Ju Li, says the work could have important implications for the design of components in nanotechnology, such as metal contacts for molecular electronic circuits. [my emphasis added]

This discovery and others regarding materials and phase changes at ever diminishing sizes hint that a computer with a functioning 7nm chip might be a bit further off than IBM is suggesting.