March 16, 2026 -
By Alan Patterson, EETimes
IBM and Lam Research aim to make chips beyond the 1-nm node. The companies, however, declined to disclose potential chipmaking partners or a timeline for commercial production.
IBM and Lam Research have a five-year agreement focused on developing new materials, fabrication processes, and High-NA EUV lithography to advance IBM’s logic scaling roadmap, the companies said in a March 10th news release. In 2021, IBM became the world’s first to make a 2-nm chip, and later partnered with Japan’s Rapidus to manufacture 2-nm devices by next year.
IBM and Lam Research aim to develop High-NA EUV lithography processes for new interconnect and device patterning, thereby accelerating industry adoption of ASML’s most advanced lithography tool. Foundries like industry leader TSMC haven’t adopted High-NA EUV yet and instead continue to use multi-patterning workarounds that extend the use of Low-NA EUV patterning tools.