IBM on Thursday unveiled the world’s first sub-1 nanometer chip technology, a research prototype at the 0.7 nanometer node that packs nearly 100 billion transistors onto a chip the size of a fingernail. The announcement centers on what IBM calls the “nanostack,” an entirely new three-dimensional transistor architecture developed at its semiconductor research facility in Albany, New York. The design stacks and staggers transistors vertically in two bonded layers, using an ultra-thin dielectric material to separate them.