With a New 7 Nanometer Chip Fabrication Process, IBM Keeps Chasing Moore's Law

On Thursday, IBM announced the debut of its latest nanoscale chip technology: a 7nm process based on extreme ultraviolet lithography. It's a clean halving of the current high-end fabrication standard of 14nm. Call it a breakthrough.

First, let's talk about scale.

There's no real point in trying to imagine 7 nanometers. You're welcome to try—take a millimeter, which is a bit less than the diameter of a jumper wire (sans insulation), and then divide it into 1,000 smaller wires. That's a micrometer. Take one of your micrometer wires and divide it into another 1,000 smaller wires. One of these is a nanometer, of which there are one million of in your original millimeter. Like I said, don't bother.

The "wires" in a contemporary computer chip—more properly known as interconnects—are already at the scale of nanometers. They're etched onto a chip using lasers, basically. Different chip fabrication methods, or processes, are referred to by the size of the features they can create on a chip. Historically, this has been measured as the smallest possible distance between the two terminals of a field effect transistor (FET), or half of the smallest distance between memory cells in a DRAM chip ("half-pitch") fabricated by a given process.

To be clear, the world of nm processes is a holy mess and it's hard to say at this point what size features are really going to be possible with a given process. The metric is a bit muddy.

"It's not clear, for example, if IBM's 30nm pitch @ 7nm will be smaller than what Intel debuts at that node," writes Joel Hruska at ExtremeTech. "IBM is claiming that 7nm will deliver a 50% area scaling improvement over and above 10nm, and at least a 50% power/performance improvement 'for the next generation of systems that will power the Big Data, cloud and mobile era.'"

Intel's been pushing its 14nm process for a couple of years now as the Core M-based Broadwell family of microarchitectures. Your computer is more likely based on Intel's 22nm process (Ivy Bridge) or even its 32nm process (Sandy Bridge), which power the Core i3 and i5 processors.

Meanwhile, TSMC and Samsung are currently in a race to get 10nm chips to market, which will likely be won sometime in early 2016. Based on TSMC's just-unveiled 10nm validation chip, the process should enable clock rates about 20 percent faster than 14nm chips, with 40 percent less power consumption. Intel's own 10nm technology (dubbed Cannonlake) is likely delayed in favor of pushing additional 14nm products. Part of the whole difficulty in moving from process to process is that new fabrication technologies often require entirely new manufacturing facilities, like Intel's currently delayed new multi-billion dollar plant in Arizona, dubbed Fab 42.

In any case, as Hruska notes, extreme ultraviolet lithography won't be ready for full production for years. In the meantime, we can just say that it exists and is pretty cool, but it won't be powering your MacBook any time soon.

Hardware's a fucking zoo, isn't it?