India, June 29 -- The semiconductor industry has spent years grappling with a difficult question: how much further can chips shrink before they hit physical limits? IBM's latest announcement suggests there is still room to move forward. The company has unveiled the world's first sub-1 nanometer chip technology, built around a new 0.7nm, or 7-angstrom, transistor node and powered by a breakthrough architecture called Nanostack.

The achievement is significant not simply because the chip is smaller. It represents a new approach to transistor design at a time when traditional scaling methods are becoming increasingly difficult. With nearly 100 billion transistors packed into a chip roughly the size of a fingernail, IBM is demonstrating that ...