TSMC And MIT Research Team Claims Amazing 1nm Chip Fab Breakthrough
https://hothardware.com/news/tsmc-and-mit-research-team-claim-1nm-chip-breakthrough

It was just earlier this month that IBM announced an incredible manufacturing breakthrough with its 2-nm manufacturing process that crammed 50 billion transistors into the size of a fingernail. While that’s still a future-looking technology that hasn’t made it into mass production (and thereby not a solution for our current chip shortage just yet), it’s already being surpassed. The combined research brainpower at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) have announced some big breakthroughs using non-silicon materials to make very tiny transistors (as small as 1nm).

The joint research paper, the abstract for which can be read on Nature’s website, describes manufacturing challenges caused by metal-induced gaps in conductivity while building the chips. Using the post-transition metal bismuth and some semi-conductive monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides, the gaps can be reduced in size, producing 2D transistors much smaller than had been previously possible.

Ultralow contact resistance between semimetal and monolayer semiconductors
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03472-9?utm_medium=affiliate&utm_source=commission_junction&utm_campaign=3_nsn6445_deeplink_PID8520947&utm_content=deeplink

And since IBM no longer has a foundry to manufacture all this, they’ve partnered with Samsung and will use their fabs.

Here’s an interesting explanation from Engadget

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OTZcxPCrppo

IBM says it has made a significant breakthrough in computer processors by creating a 2nm chip in its test lab.

IBM has unveiled the world’s first 2 nm chip, built at its R&D facility in Albany, New York. The test chip features gate-all-around transistors built with IBM’s nanosheet technology. Overall, IBM says the new process technology will enable 2 nm chips to achieve 45% higher performance or 75% lower power consumption than state-of-the art 7 nm chips in production today.

IBM was also first to demonstrate 7 nm and 5 nm test chips. The test chip IBM showed today features about 50 billion transistors and uses nanosheet structures as part of a gate-all-around (GAA) transistor, the new transistor architecture heralded as the solution to the scaling limitations of its predecessor, the FinFET.

FinFET was commercially introduced by Intel for the 22 nm node in 2011. GAA transistors replace FinFET’s fin with three wires, surrounded on all sides by the gate material. Surrounding the channel material like this allows better electrostatic control which in turn enables extremely small gate dimensions.