The company claims this will enable the production of chips that have 45% better performance or 75% lower energy use.

The announcement comes at a time when many industries that use chips are struggling to obtain sufficient stock to keep production at needed levels.

The new technology will take considerable time to be available for commercial use.

A row of 2nm nanosheet devices. Courtesy IBM

At the moment, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and Samsung produce semiconductors made using a 5nm process and TSMC has said that it will be going down to 3nm in the second half of the year.

• Quadrupling cell phone battery life, only requiring users to charge their devices every four days;
• Slashing the carbon footprint of data centres, which account for 1% of global energy use. Changing all of their servers to 2 nm-based processors could potentially reduce that number significantly.
• Drastically speeding up a laptop's functions, ranging from quicker processing in applications, to assisting in language translation more easily, to faster Internet access; and
• Contributing to faster object detection and reaction time in autonomous vehicles like self-driving cars.

"The IBM innovation reflected in this new 2 nm chip is essential to the entire semiconductor and IT industry," said Darío Gil, senior vice-president and director of IBM Research.

"It is the product of IBM's approach of taking on hard tech challenges and a demonstration of how breakthroughs can result from sustained investments and a collaborative R&D ecosystem approach."