IBM Demos Transistor Built for Liquid Nitrogen Cooling

Liquid nitrogen boils at just 77 kelvins (-196 °C). Cooling electronics to this frigid temperature could boost performance, but today’s transistors aren’t designed with cryogenic temperatures in mind. At the 2023 IEEE International Electron Device Meeting (IEDM) held in San Francisco earlier in December, IBM researchers demonstrated the first advanced CMOS transistor optimized for liquid-nitrogen cooling.

Nanosheet transistors split the channel into a stack of thin silicon sheets, which are completely surrounded by the gate. “Nanosheet device architecture enables us to fit 50…