By Rich Ptak
IBM
is no stranger to committing large sums of research and development funds for
longer term benefits. Want some examples? There was their early investment in massively
parallel computing (Deep Blue and Blue Gene) to reach commercial viability.
Their investments in multicore systems such as Power 4 and 5, which facilitated
and sped the consolidation of the Unix market. Most recently was their
investment in cognitive computing with the Jeopardy winning Watson, that is now
yielding commercial as well as societal advances and benefits in the fields of
finance, banking, retail, medical and healthcare.
Now,
for the first time, IBM has unveiled its plans to invest $3 billion dollars
over 5 years into a research program to enable and develop the next generation
of semiconductor technologies and chips that are the building blocks of
computer systems. Countering rumors of its abandoning hardware and systems
based on its sales of business lines to Lenovo, IBM provides concrete proof
that it has no intention of getting out of the systems business. The challenges
relating to energy, heat, processing time, bandwidth, size, storage, etc.
driven by applications for cloud and big data are emerging just as foreseeable
physical and manufacturing limits of existing technologies are being reached.
These
investments will extend IBM’s innovation beyond today’s semiconductor
technology breakthroughs into the leadership position in advanced technologies
required to deal with evolving and emerging challenges. Such efforts are necessary to develop and
deliver in the next ten years the as yet unknown, fundamentally different
systems needed to overcome physical and scaling limitations of techniques and
technology.
IBM
is sponsoring two research programs to address the challenges. The first will
address the challenges of the physics that limits using and manufacturing existing
silicon technology. Scaling down from today’s 22 nanometers to 10 nanometers is
doable for the next few years; moving beyond that to 7 nanometers and smaller
requires new manufacturing tools and techniques currently being researched.
The
second program looks to the develop ways to manufacture and apply computer chips
using radically new technologies in the post-silicon era. New materials and
circuit architecture designs are being researched along with techniques for
manufacturing, development and application. In addition, to avoid disruption,
systems are required to bridge between existing and new technologies.
Projects
are underway or beginning in areas that include quantum computing, neuron based
systems, carbon nanotubes, silicon photonics, neurosynaptic computing, etc.
IBM’s Research team will consist of over a thousand exiting and newly hired
scientists and engineers. Research teams will be located in Albany and
Yorktown, NY, Almaden, CA and Zurich, Switzerland.
The Final Word
IBM
has been a leader with an enviable track record in creating breakthroughs and innovation
in CMOS and silicon technology including inventing or first implementing single
cell DRAM, chemically amplified photoresists, High-k gate dialectrics, etc. They
aren’t alone in addressing the problems of existing semiconductor technology
and researching new technologies. But, they are certainly among the leaders in
the breadth and depth of their efforts. In addition to its own projects, IBM
continues and will continue to fund and collaborate with university
semiconductor research as they continue to support such private-public
partnerships as the NanoElectronics Initiative (NRI), Semiconductor Research
Network (STARnet), and the Global Research Consortium (GRC) of the
Semiconductor Research Corp.
Such efforts will all
contribute and combine to create the next level of processing power that will
enable and facilitate the move to eradicate blocks to progress and eliminate
boundaries compute capabilities. Such innovation is necessary to drive a new
class of transactions, create the capability to process a sensor-based world,
enable a new level of encryption, etc. and make it possible for a new
generation to identify and solve previously inconceivable or unsolvable
problems. The investment and effort that IBM is making gives clear proof of
their continuing interest in and dedication to delivering innovative systems.