IBM and Samsung’s new chip design could revolutionize your phone’s battery life. Here’s how:
Announcing their latest advance in semiconductor design - a new way to stack transistors vertically on a chip (instead of laying them flat on the surface of the semiconductor), IBM and Samsung stated that the new Vertical Transport Field Effect Transistors (VTFET) design will takeover the current FinFET technology.
Simply put, the new design would stack transistors vertically, allowing for current to flow up and down the stack of transistors instead of the side-to-side horizontal layout that’s currently used on most chips.
Though there’s a long road ahead before the VTFET design is used in actual consumer chips, the two companies have claimed that VTFET chips could offer a “two times improvement in performance or an 85 percent reduction in energy use”, The Verge reported.
The companies have also claimed that “cell phone batteries that could go over a week without being charged, instead of days,” and listed other uses such as less energy-intensive cryptocurrency mining, data encryption, more powerful Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and could be useful even in spacecraft.
Moreover, Intel too is working on similar designs. The company recently previewed its own successor to FinFET production technology, after it showcased its upcoming RibbonFET (Intel’s first gate-all-around transistor) design over the summer.
The RibbonFET design is set to be part of the Intel 20A generation of semiconductor products scheduled for production in 2024.
(With inputs from The Verge.)
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