IBM debuts world's first sub-1 nanometer chip technology

YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, N.Y. (AP), IBM on Thursday introduced the world's first sub-1 nanometer chip technology. The company said the technology features a transistor architecture at the 0.7 nm, or 7 angstrom, node. IBM's new sub-1 nm chip packs nearly 100 billion transistors onto a chip the size of a fingernail, nearly twice the density of the company's 2 nm chip unveiled in 2021. The design uses a new nanostack three-dimensional nanosheet-based architecture. Published technical results project the chip could deliver up to 50 percent more performance or 70 percent greater energy efficiency than IBM's 2 nm node chips. Separate research presented at VLSI 2026 showed the nanostack architecture provides 40 percent scaling in SRAM. Jay Gambetta, director of IBM Research and an IBM fellow, said the breakthrough pushes technology beyond the nanometer era to the scale of atoms. With the new nanostack architecture, IBM is reinventing how chips are built to deliver dramatically more power and energy efficiency, he said. IBM said it sees a path to production in as early as the next five years. The announcement was posted on the company's newsroom site.