Nanotechnology and nanoscale engineering helped IBM to achieve a new breakthrough in chip technology. Yesterday, the giant in computer manufacturing, IBM, showed off a prototype chip making an important technological breakthrough for the tiny transistors.
Transistors are electronic components essential for building any electronic appliance and computer. In a computer they function as electrical switches that help power the device and process information in the form of binary code. When a transistor's electric switch is switched off, a zero binary data is registered, when the transistor's electric switch is on the binary number one is counted.
The breakthrough is the result of research at the Polytechnic Institute in Albany, part of the State University of New York in collaboration with IBM's R&D team, Samsung, and other technology companies. IBM alone invested 3 billion dollars in the project. As a result of this collaborative research, they were able to come with a new technological solution that can ensure continuing future developments and advances in the manufacturing process of computer chips and processor units.
With the new nanotechnology manufacturing process chip manufacturing companies will be able to fit as many as 20 billion transistors on a fingernail sized chip. This is only half the size of the current 14 nanometer chip manufacturing standard. Just to help you imagine how miniaturized the new computer chips will be, a nanometer is actually just one billionth times smaller than a meter.
To date, this new technology is only in the testing phase, but a prototype chip was already designed and built. When this will become the next standard in computer chip manufacturing, it could have a dramatic impact.
It is estimated that the new chip making nanotechnology will bring new advances in Big Data systems and cloud computing, as well as in mobile devices, wearable gadget, cognitive computing, Artificial Intelligence, and other emerging technologies.
Yesterday's news from IBM also shows that the advancing in computer power still follows the Moore's Law. Gordon More, one of the co-founders of Intel, predicted in the year 1965 that every two years the number of transistors on a computer chip would double.
Up to date this was confirmed by the pace of technological advances. One example of this is everywhere around us. Due to miniaturization and increase in transistors' density on chips, today's smartphones can include music players, phones, cameras, and computers, all combined together in a single device.
Due to the challenges encountered in shrinking transistors on chips beyond a certain point, some engineers were concerned that the Law of More could come to an end soon. But IMB's announcement creates a new technological breakthrough that will allow decades of future developments.
