More than a few drops of ink have been spilled over the last decade over the death of Moore’s Law. Wherever you stand on just what defines “death” versus merely decelerating, the undeniable fact of the matter is that the overall rate of progress on advancing silicon lithography is slowing down. Compared to the nearly 50-year span of being able to shrink transistors by 50% every two years, in this decade, the pace of change is closer to every five years, and things are even worse for some designs, such as SRAM and analog logic.
The silver (or perhaps, silicon?) lining is that while the pace is slowing down, research into new ways to continue shrinking transistors has ramped up in response. Research teams across the industry are working to discover novel methods of building transistors and materials to build them out of in order to continue the long-standing process of packing ever more transistors into a chip.
To that end, today IBM Research is publicly announcing that they have developed a next-generation transistor design to carry the industry in the next decade, which they are calling the Nanostack. Aimed at sub-1nm geometries – and specifically the 7Å (7 Angstrom) generation – IBM Research believes that the technology can not just carry the torch forward in terms of continuing to shrink transistors, but that nanostack transistors will be the basis of fab node technologies for at least a decade.
The key aspect of the technology is wafer stacking, which is reflected in the “stack” in the name. By stacking parts of a complete logic circuit on top of each other and building up in the vertical direction, IBM believes that the technology will not only unlock the ability to reliably manufacture smaller circuits, but that stacking can be extended to further layers for even greater transistor densities.
A Quick Primer on Transistor Scaling and the Current State of Silicon Lithography
Before getting to the meat of IBM’s announcement, it would likely be helpful to outline the current state of silicon lithography in order to illustrate how IBM’s approach differs from the current generation of technology.
At present, the big three chip fabs, TSMC, Intel, and Samsung, are all in the process of switching from FinFET transistors to Gate All Around (GAAFET) transistors. This is a process that has been years in the making, as FinFET transistors, which have been with the industry since Intel started using them in 2012, have largely run out of headroom. While FinFET transistors were a very effective solution to electron leakage that classic (planar) transistors suffered from at smaller process nodes, modern process nodes are now small enough that not even FinFETs can contain them.
The solution to today’s leakage problem, then, is being realized with GAAFET transistors. In effect, an extension of the FinFET idea, a GAAFET transistor places a gate – the part of a transistor that controls turning it off and on – around the entire channel through which the energy in a transistor flows. By completely surrounding the channel with the gate, this once again reduces leakage by eliminating the ability for electrons to leak out via the base of the fin. To further enhance the technology, each transistor actually uses multiple channels, arranged as multiple sheets. Due to their thickness, these are commonly referred to as nanosheets, and IBM also colloquially uses that term for its GAAFET transistor technology.
But even though GAAFET process nodes have just reached high volume manufacturing in the last couple of years (Samsung with SF3E, Intel with 18A, and TSMC with N2), just as with FinFET they are expected to have a limited reach for scalability. Smaller transistors will require thinner and shorter sheets, and as these sheets thin out, they ultimately will struggle to contain leakage once again.
Just how long GAAFET will last has not been conclusively determined at this juncture, particularly as it is never as simple as saying it will flip from being possible to impossible at a specific transistor size. Currently, the best guess, as pegged by Imec, the non-profit independent research organization that does much of the fundamental research behind future generations of nanoelectronics, is that GAAFET will run its course in the early-to-mid 2030s. Which means it is only going to be suitable for use in cutting-edge process nodes for roughly another five to seven years. And on that short of a timeline, that means it is already time for research organizations to be refining its successor so that it can be ready for commercial production in the next decade.
“From IBM’s perspective, they have solved the question of whether it is even possible to build a nanostack transistor (they have), and now it is merely a question of refining it and scaling it up for mass production.”
And how many new technologies have fallen down between “proving it works” and “mass production”?
This is an amazing achievement, but this is one of those 80/20 problems. First 80% of the work takes 20% of the time, and the last 20% takes 80% of the time to solve.
It’s amazing to see how far semiconductor research continues to push the boundaries of physics. Innovations like this show how much long-term experimentation and collaboration go into each breakthrough. While commercialization may still be years away, it’s exciting to imagine the possibilities this could unlock.