A modern logic process does not ship one transistor; it ships a library of them. Some cells need a low threshold voltage for speed, others a high threshold voltage for low leakage, and the foundry has to deliver both on the same wafer. On finFETs that multi-Vt menu was hard-won; on gate-all-around (GAA) nanosheets, where the gate wraps the channel on all sides, it is harder still. IBM was working that problem years before GAA reached volume.
The 2020 grant US10700064B1, "Multi-threshold voltage gate-all-around field-effect transistor devices with common gates" (issued June 30, 2020; International Business Machines Corporation; CPC H01L 29/78 and H01L 21/823412 around CMOS process integration), claims exactly that combination: GAA devices that share a common gate yet present different threshold voltages.
Why does the common gate matter? Sharing a gate is what keeps a standard-cell compact. If you had to physically separate the high-Vt and low-Vt devices with their own isolated gates, you would pay area for every threshold flavor. The IBM approach modulates the work function inside the gate stack instead, so the layout stays dense while the electrical menu stays wide.
The priority here is the story. This is a 2020 grant - issued well before TSMC's N2 or Samsung's 3GAE were shipping in any volume - which tells you the foundational multi-Vt IP for GAA was being staked out at the research-IDM layer, not the foundry layer. Announced is not shipping, and filed is even earlier than announced.
Read alongside IBM's other 2020 GAA filings on work-function material and leakage control, the picture is a deliberate portfolio: not one clever device but a process kit - thresholds, leakage, isolation - assembled before the node existed. That is what it looks like when a company intends to license the building blocks rather than build the chip.
For anyone tracking who actually owns the GAA transition, the lesson is to look at the 2019-2021 grants, not the 2024 press releases. The transistor architecture the foundries are shipping now rests on claim language that was already filed when the roadmaps were still PowerPoint.