Samsung and IBM’s new chipset design could mean you need to charge your phone just once a week

• Samsung and IBM’s new chipset design could potentially double either the performance or battery life of smartphones, crypto mining rigs among other things.
• This new design is called VTFET and could succeed the current-gen FinFET design used in most modern chipsets.
• Earlier this year, MIT, NTU and TSMC developed a new chipset manufacturing process that could result in chipsets up to 1,00,000 times thinner than a strand of human hair.

Tech giants Samsung and IBM have teamed up for a new chipset design that could potentially result in a one-week battery life on smartphones. The new chipset design seems ingenious, too – instead of laying flat on the chipset, the transistors are now stacked vertically.

Samsung and IBM have named this design Vertical Transport Field Effect Transistors (VTFET), which will succeed the FinFET (Fin Field Effect Transistor) design that is used by most of the modern smartphone chipsets.

Stacking up the transistors vertically would allow Samsung and IBM to pack the chipset more densely, which alone would result in a performance and efficiency bump. The current would now pass up and down instead of horizontally, as is the case in current chipsets.

Samsung and IBM claim that this new design would allow Samsung to offer up to a two-time jump in performance, or power savings of up to 85% when compared to the current chipsets.

More semiconductor breakthroughs in the works

If the Samsung-IBM collaboration seems like a breakthrough in chipset design and performance, there’s more in store – earlier this year, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), National Taiwan University (NTU) and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) teamed up to develop a new process that would allow them to manufacture chipsets thinner than 1-nanometre.

For context, a human hair is approximately 80,000-1,00,000 nanometres wide. Even at one nanometre thickness, 80,000-1,00,000 chipsets would have to be stacked above each other to be as thick as a single strand of human hair.

To be sure, it might still be a while before we see this new chipset design in consumer electronics – most importantly, smartphones – but it could be a game changer for other use cases as well. For instance, the companies claim that this could result in less power-hungry crypto mining operations, internet-of-things (IoT) devices that last much longer between charges and more.

Basically, anything that uses this chipset design could last almost double the time between two charges.


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