How IBM Built World's First 2-Nanometer Chip During Covid-19 Pandemic

¡°The chip we have built can deliver 45% higher performance while saving 75% energy consumption when compared to today¡¯s 7-nanometer chip technology out there,¡± said Mukesh Khare very calmly, without any hyperbole of any kind. Almost like this was just business as usual, no big deal. If he was excited, he didn¡¯t show it.

IBM's Mukesh Khare

Of course, when you consider the fact that this new chip technology is going to potentially quadruple your future smartphone¡¯s battery life -- meaning you charge your phone only once every four days -- allow your laptop to have more muscle and battery juice, and cut data center operating costs significantly all over the world very soon, it¡¯s difficult to not get excited about the myriad possibilities of unlocking computational efficiencies at such a huge scale.

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¡°We believe this technology can now enable semiconductor innovation and semiconductor improvement to continue for the next decade, so that¡¯s a very exciting opportunity,¡± Khare concluded, pointing at the $1 trillion market opportunity for the industry at large to benefit from this advancement.

About the innovation

A couple of months ago, IBM unveiled a world¡¯s first, a semiconductor design breakthrough -- something that even Intel, Apple or Samsung hadn¡¯t yet demonstrated: They built the world's first chip with a 2-nanometer (nm) nanosheet technology. Mukesh Khare, Vice President, Hybrid Cloud Research, IBM (a 10 year veteran of IBM¡¯s research division), helped underscore why this 2-nm chip technology is a significant leap ahead.

¡°At the heart of a chip is a transistor, as you know, and here we introduce a new transistor structure called the nanosheet,¡± Mukesh Khare explained, with the help of the image below showing a nanosheet made of six transistors, with three nanosheets on top of each other.

IBM

¡°Each of these nanosheets,¡± continued Mukesh, ¡°is of 5-nanometer in thickness, which is about as thick as two individual strands of human DNA, and that¡¯s the precision we are putting into this chip technology.¡±

In his own words, scaling of transistors is extremely challenging, according to Mukesh Khare. In order to help roll out this 2-nm chip breakthrough technology as fast as possible, he mentioned some key features which enables IBM to continue to scale, allowing them to not only build a stack of products and services on top of the silicon, but also for companies who are part of the broader IT ecosystem.

¡°We have introduced a technology called bottom dielectric isolation (BDI), which essentially almost eliminates transistor-level power leakage in these 2-nm nanosheets, allowing us to build smaller transistors,¡± Khare said, while also tipping his hat at extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) -- which is the process of printing circuit designs on silicon wafers -- as a key differentiator in realizing the 2-nm nanosheet technology for chip designs.

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Ultimately, this breakthrough 2-nm chip technology is exciting for the broad range of applications it will impact, according to Mukesh Khare. ¡°It will accelerate AI workloads for 5G and beyond. It will unlock edge computing gains to unforeseen levels, including in areas like space exploration. Not just the future, it also has immediate implications for what the world is going through right now with the Coronavirus pandemic -- this new 2-nm chip technology will aid the discovery of new materials, new drugs, which requires very high performance computing to simulate molecular structures. And finally, this technology will also be very valuable for climate and sustainability because of the significant benefit towards reduced power consumption,¡± Khare said.

Behind the scenes

As we are all dealing with the effects of Covid-19 pandemic impacting all aspects of our work and life at large, I obviously wanted to understand how Mukesh Khare and the larger IBM team managed to complete this 2-nm chip fabrication feat under such challenging conditions. Khare highlighted how IBM has its most advanced semiconductor R&D facility they¡¯ve put together over the past 20 years in Albany, New York, with over $15 billion invested for research and development over that period. It¡¯s where this 2-nm chip breakthrough was achieved, despite immense odds.

IBM

¡°Usually this facility runs 24x7 for research and development, but as you can imagine, during the pandemic, we had to take extreme precaution with only 10-15% of our staff being present,¡± Mukesh Khare explained. ¡°And being able to run what is essentially a fab for R&D efficiently under such conditions is just unimaginable. So there are many unsung heroes who actually kept the lights on and ensured we were able to come up with this breakthrough.¡±

Apart from the EUV machines -- each of which costs $100 million per piece -- IBM also has other machines that make possible the full spectrum, state-of-the-art semiconductor design and printing inside the Albany, New York, R&D facility, according to Mukesh Khare.

¡°A silicon wafer goes through hundreds of precise steps, often several times in the process of becoming a functional chip, where everything is happening at a purely atomic level -- like depositing a couple of layers of atoms at a time. There are unbelievable challenges to surpass to innovate at such a tiny scale, and the investment both by IBM and the state of New York, as well as many partners who work at the R&D facility 24x7 make it possible to achieve such breakthroughs like the 2-nm chip technology,¡± emphasized Mukesh Khare.

In terms of where these new 2-nm chips will first make their presence known to the public -- will it be on the cloud or edge devices -- Mukesh Khare hinted towards the latter. ¡°The way IBM works is that we develop a core technology which can meet the needs of an entire market segment all the way from the edge to cloud.¡±

Remember, the 2-nm nanosheet technology allows IBM to increase the number of transistors per chip, increasing the overall compute density so they can be made even smaller, faster, more reliable, and more efficient to the point where a 2-nm chip can fit up to 50 billion transistors on a chip the size of a fingernail, according to Khare.

IBM

¡°What we have seen more recently is that mobile or edge devices have been more in adopting new technology where compute density is more important and power reduction is more important. So adoption of 2-nm chips at edge applications, towards a more consumer, mobile first application is bound to happen faster. And then it will start hitting towards the cloud application where the demand for performance and reliability are extremely high. So that's my assessment of how this technology will be deployed across the spectrum of IT applications,¡± concluded Mukesh Khare.

On the question of competitors, Mukesh Khare said, ¡°We are very proud of our ecosystem. IBM partners with both Intel and Samsung, and we are all part of a team and I'm proud to say that as IBM develops this technology it invariably helps all our partners. We are obviously proud that we are the first one to be able to share this with the world and demonstrate this 2-nm technology on functional chips. While we create the breakthrough technology, our partners operationalize it into their own products and manufacturing.¡±

Deployment amidst global chip shortage

Of course, making such technological breakthroughs takes a lot of blood, sweat and toil -- not to mention time, money and scientific faith -- where multiple disciplines electronics, physics and chemistry (to just name a few) need to come together to truly innovate. Mukesh Khare knows all of this only too well.

¡°What it tells us is that the demand for scientists and engineers who can drive innovation at the atomic scale are a rare breed, and that type of workforce is critical for making progress, which ultimately allows our society to make progress through technological innovation,¡± he said.

¡°On the application side, when this technology gets deployed in either a data center or mobile application, it will provide developers with a lot more options without worrying about, for instance, latency or speed, allowing developers to be more creative fundamentally. Ultimately, it will enable skilled workers in both space, the fundamental science and engineering or science and technology space, as well as in software and application space,¡± Mukesh declared.

Unsplash

On the global chip shortage, in many ways caused and worsened by the prevailing Covid-19 pandemic across the globe, Mukesh Khare had a couple of interesting perspectives to share.¡°Covid-19 pandemic in the world has actually accelerated the need for semiconductor chips, because we are all working from home, remote locations. Accelerated digitization of the world due to Covid-19 means the demand for chips has just skyrocketed. And we are seeing that demand, obviously, you know showing up in terms of the global chip shortage right now,¡± explained Mukesh Khare.

¡°Because of this insane demand, chip companies -- whether they're equipment companies or materials companies or chip manufacturers are -- they are all increasing their investment further to be able to build more capability and capacity. At IBM, we are working around the clock to ensure this 2-nm technology gets into the hands of manufacturers and OEMs at the earliest, so they can get it into the hands of consumers by the end of 2024 at the earliest,¡± said Mukesh Khare.

Three years is a long way out, I asked Mukesh Khare. He nodded in agreement, ¡°Unfortunately, it takes this long. From where we are right now in the innovation journey and demonstration, putting together prototypes to actually being able to ramp it up to full volume manufacturing. That essentially is the challenge because these factories cannot be built, their capacity can¡¯t be increased overnight, it takes a couple of years.¡±

¡°But these innovations, like the 2-nm chip technology IBM has demonstrated, gives more confidence to the industry, both the consumer side as well as the manufacturers side, that there is a path for next 10 years of semiconductor growth, which in turn helps them accelerate their investment towards modernizing and building capacity for higher volumes,¡± estimated Mukesh Khare.