IBM hails new 'block of flats' design breakthrough for ultra tiny chips

IBM has unveiled a new chip design which it says could enable manufacturers to cram 100 billion transistors on a silicon chip the size of a fingernail.The current industry-standard size for chips, measured in a the unit of nanometres - a billionth of a metre and the size of a few atoms - is around two nanometres (nm). But IBM claims its new chip tech is the equivalent of around 0.7nm, which may make it the world's first known chip technology below 1nm. However, it will be several years before the chip tech could be ready to go into production.The firm claims in tests, its prototype performed 50% better than its own 2nm chip and was 70% more energy efficient.It claimed similar boosts in performance when it debuted its 2nm chip tech back in 2021 - saying at the time its tests of those, slightly larger, chips produced similar leaps in performance and energy efficiency.Jay Gambetta, director of IBM Research and IBM Fellow, described the NanoStack tech as a "landmark moment" for the future of chips."With our new NanoStack architecture, we're not just making smaller transistors, we're reinventing how chips are built to deliver dramatically more power and energy efficiency," he said.