Hot on the heels of the closing of the deal that divests its semiconductor business and places it in the hands of Globalfoundries, the former chip making business of AMD that is controlled by the government of Abu Dhabi, IBM and its academic and chip industry partners have announced that they have successfully etched chips with transistors that are 7 nanometers in size – significantly smaller than current processes and extending the Moore’s Law curve one more step.It is a big step, however, based on a mix of new technologies that have not been tested in volume production before,...