The new paper “certainly is an important result,” says Jagdeep Shah, a researcher at the U.S. Department of Defense’s Institute for Defense Analyses who, as a program director at the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, initiated the program that sponsored the researchers’ work. “It is not at the megascale yet, and there are steps that need to be taken in order to get there. But this is a good step in that direction.”
“I think that the GlobalFoundries process was an industry-standard 45-nanometer design-rule process,” Shah adds. “I don’t think that there need be any concern that there’s any foundry that can’t make these things.”