IBM Leapfrogs Intel With 22nm Chips

Slatterz writes "Intel may be touting 45nm CPUs, but IBM says it can go much further with a strategy to produce future chips using a 22nm fabrication process. The company is adopting a technique called 'computational scaling' in order to manufacture circuits small enough to deliver more powerful and energy-efficient devices. Intel plans to introduce 32nm chips in 2009, but chipmakers have hit a problem in that current lithographic methods are not adequate for designs as small as 22nm owing to fundamental physical limitations. IBM claims to have solved this problem." Unfortunately the phrase "computational scaling" doesn't actually convey any information about how they've solved it.

Comments

Like Intel doesn't have labs working on this?

[Gldm]

What a joke of an article. Every semiconductor manufacturer has several generations of process in various states in the lab. Woo IBM's showing sneak peaks at 22nm!

I met with an Intel VP for an interview a while back and talked about where things are going. He had some nice lab-pr0n of what the photos claimed were 11nm transistors. I believe it was said that was "about 15 years out", and meant to offer reassurance that Moore's Law still had a bit more time left to go.

Actually here, let me go dig up my transcript so I can get a proper quote:

You're going to see that platforms are going to continue to evolve. We're moving to a faster cadence. The processor cadence is about a two year cadence, in terms of process technologies. By the way this is interesting. We know how to do Moore's Law for about another fifteen years which we've never had that kind of length of projection before. ...it sort of takes 3D transistors and all that, but we know how to do these things. It's all using standard silicon, it's CMOS it's extraordinarily well charictarized right? But we've got transistors running at 11 nanometers, I can show you photographs of them. We have the leakage issues but we've got a very good plan.

That was 2 years ago, early October 2006. Who leapfrogged what now?