Samsung and IBM have combined their knowledge and efforts to potentially create the chips of the future: here’s how they work and what the advantages are
The innovation announced by Samsung and IBM in the last few days attests to the progress we could achieve if two giants of their caliber were to face more often the challenges that technology has to face. In the future chips will change, and a lot, and they will do so according to Samsung and IBM.
The one announced by the two giants at the 67th edition of the International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) is, potentially, a revolution of epochal scope. The two giants of computer science and technology have explained to the world that they have worked for a long time to understand how to give an evolutionary step to the current chips with FinFET architecture. Which, it is true, are improving from year to year, but more and more often there is the feeling that the differences between one generation and the next are increasingly blurred, and consequently that we are close to an evolutionary peak beyond which we can no longer go.
How are the new chips of Samsung and IBM
So the conference in San Francisco, the IEDM, opened with the ringing of bells of innovation by Samsung – IBM. It is a new architecture for chips, more technically a new design, which provides a stacking of transistors, or – simplifying a lot – the individual devices that materially, connected to each other, make the chips.
In current products you have to imagine the transistors side by side, as if they were arranged on a horizontal plane, resting on a surface (obviously in infinitesimal spaces). This architecture is called FinFET and exists since many years: all the most known chips, even the most recent ones like Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 or MediaTek Dimensity 9000, are realized with FinFET design.
Samsung and IBM see the chips of tomorrow with a new architecture, called Vertical Transport Field Effect Transistors or VTFET, in more understandable terms chips in which transistors are no longer side by side but arranged one on top of the other. In FinFETs, the current flows horizontally from one side of the chip to the other, while in VTFETs the current flows vertically, so from the low vertex represented by the transistor at the base to the one acting as a high vertex, the one at the top.
The advantages of “vertical” chips
The new VTFET architecture, according to Samsung and IBM, has at least two main advantages. The first one is that it will be possible to double the chips power in less than two years, the second one is the higher efficiency obtainable from the “vertical” flow of the current, so lower consumption with the same power or higher power with the same consumption.
This is the main advantage, at least according to the two companies that have impressed with the estimate of 85% less consumption with the same power with the current chips, which means, again according to the estimates of Samsung and IBM, that in a few years we could even approach the week of autonomy on a charge that guaranteed glorious products such as the first Nokia 3310.
To say how long it will be necessary to wait for the innovation of Samsung and IBM is premature: the two have not set a time horizon within which VTFET technology will arrive on the market, we hope it will come soon.