A group of Taiwanese scientists claim to have successfully developed the world’s first 16nm chip.

National Nano Device Laboratories said it managed to create the first 16nm chip, though it is unlikely to be used in consumer tech anytime soon.

Yang Fu-liang, the lab’s chief, told AFT that the development could lead to tiny cellphones and laptops, but did not reveal many details about the process.

Interestingly it is theorised that 16nm could be the absolute physical limit of transistors due to the limitations of physics (one thing you can not avoid).

The reason for this is that once the gates within a transistor start to hit the 5nm gate size and below there is a risk of quantum tunnelling which at a very basic level means that electrons will just pass through the gate regardless of it being open or not.

It is believed that the 16nm barrier could be overcome by just by making the chips larger or layering the chips.

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