New Delhi, June 26 -- transistors can only shrink so far before the physics of silicon stops cooperating. On Thursday, IBM said it had found a way around the physics.

The company unveiled what it described as the world's first sub-1 nanometer chip technology, a transistor architecture called nanostack operating at the 0.7 nanometer, or 7-angstrom, node. The chip packs nearly 100 billion transistors onto a surface the size of a fingernail, IBM said in its announcement - roughly twice the density of IBM's 2-nanometer chip from 2021, itself only now approaching volume production.

Instead of continuing to shrink two-dimensional transistors, the nanostack approach stacks them vertically in three-dimensional layers using a process called 3D s...