Intel is showing off a wafer-thin trick that could shake up power-hungry kit. The chipmaker’s foundry boffins have built what they claim is the world’s thinnest GaN chiplet at just 19 micrometres.
Chipzilla says the sliver comes from a 300mm GaN-on-silicon wafer and is about one-fifth the width of a human hair. It is meant to cram more power, speed and efficiency into tighter spaces without cooking itself.
The lab coats have stitched together gallium nitride transistors and traditional silicon digital circuits on a single chip. That means complex control logic can sit directly on the power chiplet rather than requiring a separate companion part.
The demo, rolled out at the 2025 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting, is pitched as a fix for a growing headache. Data centres, GPUs and wireless networks want more grunt while shrinking the footprint, and plain silicon is running out of road.
By folding control circuits onto the same die, Chipzilla reckons it can cut energy lost shuttling signals between chips. Early reliability testing suggests it might actually survive outside the lab, which is usually where these things fall over.
In data centres, the idea is faster switching with less wasted power, letting voltage regulators sit closer to processors and trim losses along the way. A smaller, cooler kit tends to make bean counters less grumpy.
Wireless gear could benefit too, since GaN handles high frequencies far better than silicon. The tech can push beyond 200 GHz, which lines it up nicely for future 5G and 6G base stations and other radio front-end applications.
GaN has another edge in heat tolerance, staying stable where silicon starts to wobble at around 150°C. That should ease cooling demands and shrink the bulky hardware needed to keep things from melting.
Chipzilla is keen to stress it can build this on standard 300mm silicon wafers, which means fabs do not need a full rebuild to get in on the action. That is the sort of detail that keeps accountants calm while engineers get excited.
