Breakthrough technology in the works could someday in the future make it possible for phones and other device batteries to last at least a week before they require recharging. This claim could near fruition with IBM and Samsung announcing their partnership on a semiconductor design that will stack transistors on a chip vertically instead of laying them flat on a wafer as in the case of the prominent FinFET technology most of today’s chips are based on.
The new breakthrough design called the Vertical-Transport Nanosheet Field Effect Transistor (VTFET) will take an unconventional approach to arrange transistors on a chip. The new way will mean stacking transistors vertically on the chip to allow the current to flow up and down the transistors as opposed to side-to-side in the horizontal layout in chips based on the FinFET design.
This new approach is meant to replace the current FinFET technology to pack the chips more densely with transistors than presently possible. The VTFET design, IBM claims, can either improve the performance twice or bring about an 85 percent reduction in energy consumption in comparison to the FinFET design.
According to IBM, this new technology will mean many benefits to the end-user. The most prominent of which is the possibility of smartphone batteries running for a week on the trot before requiring a recharge. Additionally, VTFET tech could also reduce the amount of energy required to mine cryptocurrency, or even help the Internet of Things (IoT) industry to thrive with reduced energy usage.
The VTFET design with the vertical transistor arrangement will definitely revolutionize the consumer electronics industry, which is majorly crippled by the lack of breakthrough innovations in increasing battery life for devices. However, IBM and Samsung’s latest technology is far from being full proof at the moment, and there is no information on when it could start trickling into the real world.
