How Will Angstrom-Scale Chips Advance the Electronics Industry?

By _Synopsys Blog

November 16, 2023

Every time you stream a 4K movie from your phone or play an online video game, you require bandwidth—high rates of data transfer that enable your connected devices to deliver engaging, interactive, and immersive experiences. Our digital world—with its increasing levels of intelligence—continues to demand more from the underlying technologies that make all these activities possible. But there are bottlenecks that threaten to thwart real-time responses or slow down what can otherwise be a quick transaction.

Engineering ingenuity has had a way of pushing innovation forward, and the semiconductor industry has certainly been at the forefront of this push. We’ve seen Moore’s law stretched to single-digit nanometers, as designers pack billions of transistors onto a single chip to satisfy the needs of compute-intensive applications such as AI, high-performance computing, and networking. With scale and system complexities growing, nanometer-scale physical chip features may no longer suffice, paving the way for angstrom-level scaling.

At one ten-billionth of a meter, an angstrom is a unit of measurement often used to convey sizes of atoms, molecules and, in the case of the semiconductor industry, dimensions of IC parts. In 2021, Intel was the first to lay out a process roadmap that introduced the angstrom era, anticipated to be manufacturing-ready in 2024. Meanwhile, imec, the independent research hub for nano and digital technologies, has outlined a chip scaling roadmap that takes the industry to two angstroms by 2036.

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