A groundbreaking 5-nanometre chip

A fingernail-sized chip housing a whopping 30 billion transistors, the on-off switches of electronic devices, could be a possibility soon. The impetus comes from development of transistors for a 5-nanometre semiconductor chip, jointly by IBM Research and partners GlobalFoundries and Samsung. Right now, the most advanced semiconductor chips use a FinFET process with circuitry that is 10 nanometres in width. Companies such as Intel can build chips with 10 or 15 billion transistors using that process.