TSMC announces 1-nanometer Chip Process

After it was announced last year that it was working on a manufacturing process for 2-nanometer chips, TSMC has now improved the process further. We are now working on new materials that will allow 1-nanometer chips.

The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has thus achieved an important breakthrough in the production of even smaller chips. According to the Toms Hardware report, the company has published the first findings from the research area in the journal Nature (Paywall).

Since the use of silicon in semiconductor manufacturing has reached its limits in recent years, chip manufacturers are constantly looking for new materials that will enable them to further shrink their manufacturing processes. This is important in order to pack more transistors into the same area. Now TSMC, the world’s largest contract semiconductor manufacturer, has announced the development of such a material called “semi-metal bismuth” in cooperation with the National University of Taiwan and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. TSMC hopes that this will enable the production of 1-nanometer chips in the coming years.

Research advances

As the manufacturing processes are getting smaller and smaller, chip manufacturers are faced with the problem of higher resistance and lower currents at the contact electrodes of the transistors, which are responsible for the power supply. According to the research report, these problems can be addressed with new materials or even circumvented entirely. According to the report in the journal Nature, the new material should significantly reduce resistance while increasing the amount of electricity that can be transmitted.

However, the technology is still at the experimental stage. It is still many years away from the mass production of 1-nanometer chips, but TSMC is already paving the way for this.