A 5nm chip is just a few atoms thick.
It could fit 30 billion transistors on a chip the size of a fingernail. The researchers say the achievement will allow the $330 billion chip industry to continue to evolve according to Moore's Law. Moore's Law is a theory proposed by Intel founder Gordon Moore in 1965 that predicts that the number of transistors on a chip will double every few years.
IBM detailed its findings at the 2017 VLSI Technology Symposium in Tokyo, Japan. Two years ago, IBM researchers introduced a 7-nanometer node test chip with 20 billion transistors installed on it. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter. Five nanometers is only a few atoms thick.