IBM has today announced a breakthrough chip-stacking technology in a manufacturing environment that paves the way for three-dimensional chips to extend Moore’s Law way beyond traditionally expected limits. The ‘through-silicon-vias’ technology allows different chip components to be packaged much closer together, resulting in faster, smaller and lower-powered systems. This breakthrough from IBM enables the move from horizontal 2-D chip layouts to 3-D chip stacking, which takes chips and memory devices that traditionally sit side- by-side on a silicon wafer and stacks them together on top of one another. The end result being a compact sandwich of components that dramatically reduces the size of the overall chip package and boosts the speed at which data flows among the functions on the chip.
“This breakthrough is a result of more than a decade of pioneering research at IBM,” Lisa Su, vice president Semiconductor Research and Development Center, IBM told DaniWeb, continuing “This allows us to move 3-D chips from the 'lab to the fab' across a range of applications.”
The new IBM method eliminates the need for long metal wires that connect today’s 2-D chips together, instead relying on through-silicon-vias, which are essentially vertical connections etched through the silicon wafer and filled with metal. These vias allow multiple chips to be stacked together, allowing greater amounts of information to be passed between the chips. The technique shortens the distance information on a chip needs to travel by 1000 times, and allows for the addition of up to 100 times more channels, or pathways, for that information to flow compared to 2-D chips. That is the equivalent of parking 10 feet from the airport in a parking garage with multiple floors, instead of parking in one of the lots spread two miles from the terminal, allowing you to get into the airport more quickly.
IBM is already running chips using the through-silicon-via technology in its manufacturing line and will begin sampling chips using this method to customers in the second half of 2007, with production in 2008. The first application of this through-silicon-via technology will be in wireless communications chips that will go into power amplifiers for wireless LAN and cellular applications. 3-D technology will also be applied to a wide range of other applications including IBM’s high-performance server and supercomputing chips – the same chips that power the world’s business, government and scientific efforts. In particular, IBM is applying the new through-silicon-via technique in wireless communications chips, Power processors, Blue Gene supercomputer chips and for high-bandwidth memory:
This is the fifth major chip breakthrough in five months from IBM, as it leads the industry in its quest for new materials and architectures to extend Moore’s Law.
In December, IBM announced the first 45nm chips using immersion lithography and ultra-low-K interconnect dielectrics to be available in mid-2008.
In January, IBM announced “high-k metal gate,” which substitutes a new material into a critical portion of the transistor that controls its primary on/off switching function. The material provides superior electrical properties, while allowing the size of the transistor to be shrunk beyond limits being reached today.
In February, IBM revealed a first-of-its-kind, on-chip memory technology that features the fastest access times ever recorded in eDRAM (embedded dynamic random access memory).
Then in March, IBM unveiled a prototype optical transceiver chipset capable of reaching speeds at least eight times faster than optical components available today.
