How small can you go?

Chips drive our digital world, and millions of products like cars, computers, washing machines, smartphones, and more rely on semiconductors. Over the years, chip improvements have been incredible, and since 1956, computing power has increased one trillion-fold, paving the way for technology to advance to where it is today.

To understand today’s digital gold, it is essential to recognize that the number of transistors used on a chip determines its computational power and energy efficiency. In 1965, Gordon Moore, who co-founded and led Intel as CEO, observed that the number of transistors used on a chip doubles every two years; his observation is commonly known as Moore’s law. Moore’s law has held until now but is on the path to becoming obsolete as we move towards two nanometer (nm) chip technology. According to IBM, such a leap will offer a 45% increase in computing performance or slash power consumption by 75%.

Today, the standard length of transistors is 10 nanometers. With the latest research, top companies have produced 5 nm or 7 nm chips. In 2010, the Apple iPhone 4 was powered by the A4 chip built by Samsung using the 45nm process node; the Apple-designed chipset for the iPhone 13 series was the A15 Bionic built by TSMC using its improved 5nm process node. This chip carries 15 billion transistors and has a density of 135,14 million transistors per square mm.

To produce these new-generation chips, foundries must etch the characteristics of each chip onto silicon wafers that are cut into individual chips. Currently, this can only be done with ASML’s Extreme Ultra-Violet lithography. ASML’s next-generation EUV machine will launch in 2024, allowing foundries to build chips with process nodes beyond the 2nm where roadmaps currently end. To grasp the extreme precision of this EUV system, imagine an astronaut on the moon using a laser pointer to pick out detail on a whiteboard on Earth.

Expectations are that when 1nm nodes become a reality, the nano name might vanish, and we will witness the rise of photolithographic chips in angstroms (1 Å = 0.1 nm). Intel already applied rebranding in its roadmap to begin an entirely new era in the first half of 2024: The angstrom era.

This decade will likely see us move below 1nm. The boundaries of intelligence at the size of a fingertip will increase significantly and have a massive impact on technologies such as AI, 5G, and edge computing. The outcome of today’s technology would result in a 50% performance improvement for computing or could be applied for sustainability with a fivefold decrease in energy usage. Who would not want a phone that only needed to be charged every five days?

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