IBM to spend $3 billion on computer chip research

IBM Corp. announced Wednesday that it will spend $3 billion over the next five years to transform the technology industry by developing a "new era" of computer chips that are smaller, faster and more powerful than those in today's computers.

The Armonk-based company, whose research teams will include scientists from its Yorktown operation, hopes to find ways to scale and shrink silicon chips to make them more efficient, and research new materials to use in making chips.

With the obstacles posed by silicon, IBM is turning its attention to developing "new areas beyond traditional silicon architectures," spokesman Doug Shelton said a week before its widely anticipated second-quarter earnings report.

These areas, he said, "could transform computing of all kinds. In the next ten years, there will be fundamentally new systems that no one has yet heard of."

The first new research program is aimed at reducing the size of chips from the current 22 nanometers to 7 nanometers and smaller. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.

The second program will focus on developing new technologies for chips in the "post-silicon era," which IBM says are needed because silicon-based semiconductors – substances that conduct electricity and control currents – are reaching their physical limits for future computer applications.

Increasingly small dimensions "will prohibit gains in performance due to the nature of silicon and the laws of physics," IBM said. In the coming years, reduced sizes won't yield the same benefits of lower power, lower cost and higher speed processing as in the past.

The announcement follows months of speculation about a possible sale by IBM of its chip business, most likely the manufacturing end in East Fishkill.

The East Fishkill complex, opened in 1962 and built up over decades, had as many as 11,600 people working for IBM there in 1984, back when IBM reported jobs by site. IBM no longer reveals site populations. But it had an average of 3,675 employees in 2013, according to a required company posting seen by members of the Alliance@IBM worker group.

IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center includes a facility in Yorktown Heights.