TSMC announces breakthrough with 1 nm chip technology

TSMC and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology applied new materials to develop 1 nm chips, which increase operational efficiency and reduce energy consumption.
Information published on May 18 shows that TSMC, Taiwan University (NTU) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) of the US have achieved a significant breakthrough in the development of 1 nm chip, surpassing the design. 2 nm semiconductor was announced by IBM last month.

On each microprocessor there are billions of transistors and nm (nanometer) – the unit of measurement of transistor size. The smaller the size, the more transistors the processor can hold, making it faster and more efficient. TSMC’s most advanced chip today uses a 5 nm process with about 173 million transistors per square millimeter. Silicon chip wafers in TSMC’s production line. Photo: TSMC. This breakthrough was discovered by the MIT team, with components optimized by TSMC and improved by NTU. The core component uses semi-metallic bismuth as the electrode of a two-dimensional material to replace silicon, allowing for reduced resistance and increased amperage. Energy efficiency will thus rise to unprecedented heights in the semiconductor industry. Chipmakers have been trying to stuff more and more transistors into increasingly smaller chips, but are nearing the limits of silicon-based technology. That prompted scientists to look for two-dimensional materials to replace silicon to produce chips on the 1 nm process or smaller. More transistors on a chip gives manufacturers more options to deliver core innovations to improve performance for leading tasks like AI and cloud computing, and pave the way for better security. Encryption and encryption are performed by hardware. The need to increase performance and save energy in each processor has never cooled down, especially in the era of the cloud, AI, and IoT. Most of today’s chip-integrated devices use 10 nm or 7 nm process technology. The two largest chip manufacturers in the world, TSMC and Samsung, are launching chips with the 5 nm process, while Intel is still at the 7 nm stage. TSMC also only plans to start moving to the 4mm process later this year before mass production in 2022.