Samsung and IBM’s VTFET Chip Could Make Phone Battery Last a Week
Utilizing a vertical stacking method of transistors.
Samsung and IBM have recently announced that they have made advancements in semiconductor design. They have found a new way to stack the transistors. They are stacking them vertically on a chip instead of following the previous method of lying flat on the surface of the semiconductor. As a result, the phone might have week-long battery life.
IBM and Samsung VTFET chip
Named VTFET (vertical transport field-effect transistors), this design might succeed the FinFET technology that is used by the advanced chips of today. The new tech can also make way for densely packed chips with the transition that we have today. All in all, the innovative design, where transistors stack vertically, will let current flow up and down the stack.
Vertical designs for semiconductors have been trending for some time now, and FinFET already provides some of those benefits. Though Samsung and IBM’s announcement has raised hopes, it would be some time before this technology can be widely adopted.
Samsung and IBM claim that the new tech could offer a “two times improvement in performance or an 85 percent reduction in energy use” compared to FinFET designs. They also claim that by packing more transistors into chips, the VTFET technology could help keep Moore’s law’s goal of steadily increasing transistor count moving forward.
The innovative technology might also help create “cell phone batteries that could go over a week without being charged, instead of days,” believe IBM and Samsung. They also believe that the new chip design might assist with the creation of more powerful IoT devices or even spacecraft and less energy-intensive cryptocurrency mining or data encryption.
IBM showed off the first 2nm chip a few months back. It took a different route toward cramming more transistors by scaling up the amount that can fit onto a chip using the existing FinFET design. VTFET aims to take things further, but it will be a long while before you can see the new chip design in the world.
Though Samsung and IBM seem to have done an excellent job with the chip design, they are not the only ones innovating in this area. Intel has previewed its upcoming RibbonFET design over the summer, which is Intel’s first gate-all-around transistor and a successor to FinFET production technology. It also has shared plans for stacked transistor technology as well.
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