Billionaire Elon Musk believes IBM's branding for its latest chip manufacturing technology announcement is misleading. IBM announced its 0.7-nanometer manufacturing technology yesterday and claimed it to be the most advanced in the world. But Musk believes that the nomenclature does not describe the feature size of the transistors manufactured with the technology. The billionaire, who is spearheading his Terafab project, which aims to produce up to a terawatt of computing capacity in a year, believes that the number of atoms should dictate nomenclature instead.
Elon Musk Believes Atoms Should Decide Chip Manufacturing Technology Names
As part of its announcement, IBM outlined that the 0.7-nanometer process builds on the firm's nanosheet technology by relying on nanostacking. Through nanostacking, the firm claims to vertically stack transistors on top of each other to increase the overall density of a chip. IBM added that wafer bonding played a key role in its 0.7-nanometer development and was candid about its nomenclature as well.
In a blog post, the firm remarked:
"As with all recent advances in transistor size, 7 angstroms refers to this new generation of chips, made with its specific manufacturing process. Here, 7 angstroms doesn’t correspond to the width of the contacted metal wires in the chip, as it traditionally did many generations ago when chips were much less dense."
Tesla and SpaceX billionaire Elon Musk shared his thoughts on the new technology as well. Responding to a post on X, which commented that the "actual number of printed features on this chip that are “sub-1 nanometer. This naming convention makes absolutely no sense and is highly misleading.” = ZERO," Musk concurred. The billionaire agreed and remarked that "we should switch to naming process nodes according to the number of atoms wide of the smallest feature size. That would be most accurate imo."
Manufacturing process technology nomenclature has come to mean different things over the past couple of years. So much so that Intel renamed its roadmap in 2021. The firm changed the name of its 10-nanometer process to Intel 7 and its 7-nanometer process to Intel 4. The shifts came as Taiwan's TSMC grew its market share in the global contract chip manufacturing industry.
TSMC's products are used by Intel's smaller rival AMD, which has relied on the firm's ability to produce advanced chips at scale. More recently, TSMC has also become one of NVIDIA's most important supply chain partners after playing another key role behind Apple's shift to custom chips for the iPhone, the MacBook and other products.
About the author: Ramish is a seasoned technology writer and editor with more than a decade of experience. He specializes in semiconductor fabrication and market analysis. With a background in finance and supply chain management - via his bachelors in Finance and a micromasters in supply chain management from MIT - Ramish combines financial rigor with deep industry insight to deliver accurate and authoritative coverage.
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