Cloud and Big Data applications are challenging today’s systems, and the underlying chip technology is facing significant physical scaling limits as well. According to IBM, these challenges include bandwidth to memory, high-speed communication and device power consumption. To address these challenges, IBM today announced it is investing $3 billion over the next five years into two research and development programs aimed at shrinking the size of silicon-based chips as well as developing non-silicon-based chips.

Creating innovation at the chip level in order to differentiate is something that the industry is seeing not only from IBM. HP is aiming to reinvent computing architectures with non-volatile memory technology. Oracle has its Sparc T5 line and Intel is building a quad-core 64-bit ARM chip. “Chip wars are back,” said John Furrier, founder of SiliconANGLE. “I love it because innovation will orbit around this trend. Look at Open Compute and other hardware innovations from core computing to edge devices. This is huge investment by IBM that should pay dividends down the road.”

IBM said its first research program will focus on developing what IBM calls “7 nanometer and beyond” silicon technology that IBM says will address the serious physical challenges that threaten current semiconductor scaling techniques. IBM researchers predict that scaling semiconductors from today’s 22 nanometers down to 7 nanometers will require significant innovation in semiconductor architectures, as well as invention of new tools and techniques for manufacturing. “The question is not if we will introduce 7 nanometer technology into manufacturing, but rather how, when and at what cost?” said John Kelly, Senior Vice President at IBM Research, in a statement.

IBM’s second research program will focus on developing “alternative technologies” for “post-silicon era” chips using entirely different approaches, which IBM scientists say are required because of silicon-based semiconductors’ physical limitations. The alternative technologies that IBM Research scientists and engineers will be researching include carbon nanoelectronics, silicon photonics, new memory technologies, and architectures that support quantum and cognitive computing. The scientists and engineers will focus on improving system-level performance and energy efficient computing.

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