Hughes Metras, Leti’s VP of Strategic Partnerships North America, introduced the lead talk at their SemiconWest 2014 Leti Day about monolithic 3D technology as the “solution for scaling.” Hughes presented the Leti device technology roadmap which showed monolithic 3D (M3D) as an alternative to scaling from the 2Xnm nodes to well past 5nm. Here’s the important piece of that roadmap, which highlights the partnership with Qualcomm (ST and IBM helped with some of the work as well):

The lead talk was given by device scientist Olivier Faynot, Leti’s Device Department Director.  He titled his talk “M3D, a disruptive approach for further scaling,” and began with why the industry needs a solution for scaling.

Most in the industry are in agreement that scaling past the 22nm node, while still quite technically feasible, has priced itself out of most markets. Olivier discussed the what (transistor costs are no longer decreasing) and the why (litho cost escalation and connectivity inefficiencies of energy and delay). And then he made the statement: “if we just keep the current (2Xnm) technology, we can go farther in cost scaling.” [note: see the following blogs and comments for more info on this crucial topic:  Tech Design Forums summary "3D and EDA need to make up for Moore’s Law, says Qualcomm" and Zvi-Or-Bach’s EETimes blogs Qualcomm Calls for Monolithic 3D IC and  28nm - The Last Node of Moore's Law.]

Oliver showed a summary of a DAC2014 paper and a Qualcomm/GeorgiaTech DAC2014 paper Power/Performance/Area analysis of M3D for an FPGA:

The solution is to build the stack sequentially, in a monolithic fashion. Olivier described their monolithic 3D, or sequential 3D, process flow where the lower-level (first layer) of transistors and its interconnect are conventionally made, then inter-level metal is crafted to help the vertical interconnection, and then a second layer of monocrystalline silicon is layer transferred and oxide-oxide low temperature bonded to the top of the inter-level metal dielectric. This is a blanket layer so there are no alignment issues such as those suffered by the thick layer and pre-made (TSV) parallel processing flows. The layer that is transferred in M3D is very thin (10-200nm final), so that direct alignment thru that thin layer to the lower level alignment marks can be made with conventional equipment and achieve conventional alignment tolerances (single digit nanometers).

Now upper-level transistors are formed utilizing SPER (Solid Phase Epitaxial Regrow) for junction doping at 475-600°C and other lower (<400°C) temperature processing for gate stacks, etc. The upper-level and inter-level vertical interconnect is then processed, again with full alignment capability to the lower layer. Note that the lower level transistor Ni salicides are stabilized with platinum co-deposition and fluorine/tungsten implantation to enable their survival at the 475-600°C SPER thermal exposure.

Oliver also talked about using laser annealing to activate implanted dopants and repair damages during upper-level transistor processing. He called the laser (pulsed and short wavelength) option of solving the thermal challenge of monolithic 3D as the “crème brûlée” of methods and they were ‘seeing good results.’ Hopefully we will see published data soon. For more information on SPER and laser processing please see my recent blog Monolithic 3DIC: Overcoming silicon defects.

Oliver was also asked in the Q&A if stress was a big issue. He replied that stress was not an issue, rather, the biggest challenges were integration ones (how to form a low temp top transistor, stability of the local interconnect level, and the bottom transistor salicide stability). Olivier was asked in the Q&A what the observed performance differences were between the upper-level and lower-level transistors. He replied” Currently we are achieving 95% (of the lower for the upper). We believe we can make 100%.”

Leti has a 14nmPDK ready to go for those who want to design a test circuit in their monolithic 3D flow. They have ELDO, HSPICE, Virtusoso, Calibre, StarRC, etc. files available.

Not too surprisingly, the Qualcomm logo showed up on some of the Leti presentation slides. Back in December 2013, Leti signed an agreement to work with Qualcomm – Qualcomm to Evaluate Leti’s Non-TSV 3D Process. ST and IBM have also been working with Leti in various aspects, for example, IBM & Leti used COMPOSE3 to simulate a monolithic InGaAs nFET monolithically over a SiGe pFET on SOI.

CEA-Leti has been busy working on processing flows to enable monolithic 3D devices since before 2009. Perrine Batude won the 2009 Roger A. Haken Best Student Paper Award for the IEDM 2009 paper entitled, “Advances in 3D CMOS Sequential Integration,” where she showed results for a sequentially processed P over N (no metal between transistors layers) testchip Batude’s 2011 IEDM paper showed a 50nm 3D sequential structure on 10nm channel silicon:

CEA-Leti also opened a complete 300mm fab extension dedicated to 3D-integration applications, both parallel and monolithic, with an inauguration event in January 2011. As well, back in December 2013, Soitec and CEA renewed their long-standing partnership for an additional five years.

Clearly, monolithic 3D integration has a very important role for the future of the semiconductor industry. I would like to invite you to the IEEE S3S Conference: SOI technology, 3D Integration, and Subthreshold Microelectronics. The 2014 S3S Conference will be held October 6-9, 2014 at the Westin San Francisco Airport. This would be a great opportunity to learn more about monolithic 3D technology, with five invited presentations covering topics from design tools to monolithic 3D NAND and other 3D memories. CEA Leti will present their work on CMOS monolithic 3D IC. Researchers from MIT and Stanford will present manufacturing monolithic 3D devices with materials other than silicon.

See you there!

We have a guest contribution from Zvi Or-Bach, the President and CEO of MonolithIC 3D Inc. Mr. Or-Bach discusses about the shift in semi equipment, a paradigm confirmed lately.

Our blog Paradigm shift: Semi equipment tells the future, was focused on the quote: “Now more money is spent on upgrading existing facilities, while new capacity additions are occurring at a lower pace.” And now, just prior to Semicon West, we have the conclusion of the recent SEMI’s World Fab Forecast — Technology Node Transitions Slowing Below 32 nm. The SEMI World Fab Forecast uses a bottom-up approach methodology, providing high-level summaries and graphs, and in-depth analyses of capital expenditures, capacities, technology and products by fab. The following chart illustrates this new paradigm:

The report states: “The cost per wafer has become an increasing concern below the 32nm node.   The expected cost reduction benefit of production at smaller nodes is diminishing and is not keeping pace with the scaling benefits in many cases.  This has widespread and fundamental implications for an industry long following the cadences of Moore’s Law… These may be contributing factors as to why some volume fabs are exhibiting a lag in beginning production of new technology node.  Now evident quantitatively for the first time, there is evidence of a clear slowdown in volume production scaling of leading technology node transitions.” (emphasis added)

It is fitting to point to the comment made to EE Times coverage on Semicon West – 13 Things I Heard at Semicon West: “No matter what Intel says, Moore’s Law is slowing down,” said Bob Johnson, a semiconductor analyst for Gartner. “Only a few high-volume, high-performance apps can justify 20 nm and beyond.” He sees problems ahead for logic chips in general,” and to follow with quotes from another EE Times article – Silicon Highway Narrows, Twists: “Most foundries have yet to start buying the capital equipment needed for the 14/16 nm node, which for many will be the first to support FinFETs, says Trafas of KLA-Tencor. Gear companies hope the orders start coming in the fall…Indeed, he says, one of the big questions many capital equipment execs will bring to this year’s Semicon West event on July 7 is, “When will the 16/14 nm investments begin?”

Since the 65 nm node, escalating costs of fab and process technology development and design, as illustrated in the chart below, put a huge pressure on the industry.

These escalating costs drove consolidation in the industry, cutting down to a handful the vendors who are still pursuing the leading edge.

At the recent (2014) SST ConFab in Las Vegas Bill McClean shared his annual report on Major trends shaping the future IC Industry. Bill reports: “Over the last two decades, the percentage of capex being spent by the top 5 has steadily increased to its current 70% with the big three of Samsung, Intel and TSMC being responsible for over 50%.” This is illustrated by the following chart.

Clearly the escalating costs drove out most but the largest vendor, but now we are facing the ”second punch” – the diminishing returns.

In the recent ITC conference Harry J. Levinson of GlobalFoundries in his talk: Lithography Issues for High Volume Manufacturing” presented the following chart:

The dramatic increase of lithography cost eats away the historical transistor cost reduction resulting from reduced dimensions, as we reported in our blog Qualcomm: Scaling down is not cost-economic anymore – so we are looking at true monolithic 3D. Quoting Qualcomm “One of the biggest problems is cost. We are very cost sensitive. Moore’s Law has been great. Now, although we are still scaling down it’s not cost-economic anymore. It’s creating a big problem for us.” Accordingly we detailed in our blog that Moore’s Law has stopped at 28nmand following nodes would not provide lower transistor cost, and for most application will result in higher SoC costs.

We should not be surprised that the production ramp up below 28 nm is extremely slow. There is too much money involved to put it into the wrong place.

Going back to the SEMI World Fab Forecast, the authors ask “What’s next?” and respond: “Many in our industry are grappling with what to do as they have perceived the coming slowdown in technology node transitions.  IC manufacturers are now increasingly looking outside of conventional lithography and wafer size scaling approaches to pick up the pace of cost reduction while increasing transistor density and performance. Using memory as an example, to cope with increasing challenges in continuing to scale 2D, memory companies are looking into 3D.”

So the memory vendors already started shifting their Capex budget to scaling up with 3D NAND, instead of scaling to smaller dimension. Recently Qualcomm announced their collaboration with SMIC – China’s SMIC-Qualcomm 28-nm Deal: Why Now? – indicating more capacity build-up for 28 nm with looking forward to scaling up with monolithic 3D for logic as well. Quoting: ”Going forward, SMIC will also extend its technology offerings on 3DIC and RF front-end wafer manufacturing in support of Qualcomm”.

It is clear now that we are seeing a paradigm shift in the semiconductor equipment industry. After many decades of relentless dimensional scaling every two years, there is a change coming and we see a lower rate of dimensional scaling and exploration of other paths, to keep industry’s march on. We do believe that the next few decades will be about scaling with 3D Integration and we are pleased to see many others thinking the same.

The 2014 S3S Conference is scheduled for October 6-9, 2014, at the Westin San Francisco Airport, and would be a great opportunity to learn more about monolithic 3D technology, with five invited presentations covering topics from design tools to monolithic 3D NAND and other 3D memories. CEA Leti will present their work on CMOS monolithic 3D IC. Researchers from MIT and Stanford will present manufacturing monolithic 3D devices with materials other than silicon.

We have a guest contribution today from Brian Cronquist, MonolithIC 3D Inc.'s VP of Technology & IP. Brian discusses about monolithic 3d technology for future scaling.

At the CEA-Leti Day July 8 during Semicon West, Hughes Metras, Leti's vice president of strategic partnerships for North America, introduced the lead talk about monolithic 3D technology as the "solution for scaling." The Leti device technology roadmap that Hughes presented showed monolithic 3D (M3D) as an alternative to scaling from the 2Xnm nodes to past 5 nm.Olivier Faynot, Leti's device department director and a well-known device scientist (with more than 170 papers/publications), entitled his talk "M3D, a disruptive approach for further scaling" and started with why the industry needs such a solution.

The majority of people in the industry agree that scaling past the 22nm node, though still quite technically feasible, has priced itself out of most markets. Faynot discussed the "what" (transistor costs are no longer decreasing) and the "why" (litho cost escalation and connectivity inefficiencies of energy and delay). Then he said, "If we just keep the current [2Xnm] technology, we can go farther in cost scaling."

Tech Design Forum's summary of a Qualcomm executive's DAC 2014 keynote offers more information on this crucial topic. So do a pair of EE Times blogs by Zvi Or-Bach.

The solution is to build the stack sequentially in a monolithic fashion. (See Monolithic 3D IC Technologies.) Faynot described a process flow wherein the lower level (first layer) of transistors and its interconnect are made conventionally, some interlevel metal is crafted to help the vertical interconnection, and a second layer of monocrystalline silicon is layer transferred and oxide-oxide bonded at low temperature to the top of the interlevel metal dielectric. This is a blanket layer, so there are no alignment issues such as those suffered by the thick layer and pre-made (TSV) parallel processing flows. The layer that is transferred in M3D is very thin, so that direct alignment to the lower-level alignment marks can be made with conventional equipment, and conventional alignment tolerances (single-digit nanometers) can be achieved.

Upper-level transistors are formed utilizing solid-phase epitaxial regrow (SPER) for junction doping at 475-600°C and lower-temperature processing (less than 400°C) for things like gate stacks. The upper-level and inter-level vertical interconnect is then processed, again with full alignment capability to the lower layer. (Note that the lower-level transistor salicides are stabilized with platinum and fluorine/tungsten implantation to enable their survival at the 475-600°C SPER thermal exposure.)

In the Q&A session, Faynot was asked what the observed performance differences were between the upper-level and lower-level transistors. "Currently, we are achieving 95%" of the lower for the upper, he said. "We believe we can make 100%."

He also talked about using laser annealing to activate implanted dopants and repair damages during upper-level transistor processing. The laser option of solving the thermal challenge of monolithic 3D is the "crème brûlée" of methods, and Leti is "seeing good results." Hopefully, we will see published data soon. My recent Solid State Technology blog offers more information on SPER and laser processing.

Faynot was also asked if stress is a big issue. He replied that stress is not an issue. Rather, the biggest challenges are integration ones.

Leti has a PDK ready to go for those who want to design a test circuit in their monolithic 3D flow. The company has ELDO, HSPICE, Calibre, StarRC, and other files available, and it has said that monolithic 3D offers savings of at least 55% on area, 23% on performance, and 25% on power over 2D.

Not too surprisingly, the Qualcomm logo showed up on some of the Leti presentation slides. Back in December, Leti signed an agreement to work with Qualcomm. ST and IBM have also been working with Leti in various areas.

Since before 2009, CEA-Leti has been busy working on processing flows to enable monolithic 3D devices. Perrine Batude won the 2009 Roger A. Haken Best Student Paper Award for the IEDM 2009 paper "Advances in 3D CMOS Sequential Integration" (subscription required). In that paper, she and her co-authors showed results for a sequentially processed P over N (no metal between transistor layers) test chip. In an IEDM 2011 paper, she and her colleagues showed a 50nm 3D sequential structure on 10nm channel silicon, illustrated below.

CEA-Leti also opened a complete 300mm fab extension dedicated to 3D-integration applications -- both parallel and monolithic -- with an inauguration event in January 2011. In December 2013, Soitec and CEA renewed their longstanding partnership for an additional five years.

Clearly, monolithic 3D integration has a very important role for the future of the semiconductor industry. It is therefore fitting that the traditional IEEE conference on SOI has extended its scope and now calls itself S3S: SOI technology, 3D Integration, and Subthreshold Microelectronics. The 2014 S3S Conference is scheduled for Oct. 6-9 at the Westin San Francisco Airport. CEA-Leti will present its work on CMOS monolithic 3D IC. Researchers from MIT and Stanford will present manufacturing monolithic 3D devices with materials other than silicon. With five invited presentations covering topics from design tools to monolithic 3D NAND and other 3D memories, this would be a great opportunity to learn more about monolithic 3D technology.

-- Brian Cronquist is vice president of technology and IP at MonolithIC 3D Inc. He has 35 years of semiconductor industry experience as senior director of technology development and foundry at the nonvolatile FPGA provider Actel (now Microsemi), starting and building Chartered Semiconductor-Singapore (now GlobalFoundries), running startup wafer fab engineering teams at Sierra Semiconductor (now PMC-Sierra), and developing process technology at AMI and Synertek/Honeywell. He has published more than 100 technical papers in the fields of semiconductor microelectronic radiation effects and hardening, as well as new 3D-IC, logic, antifuse, and flash processes, devices, and reliability. He holds more than 60 issued/pending patents.

We have a guest contribution today from Brian Cronquist, MonolithIC 3D Inc.'s VP of Technology & IP. Brian discusses about overcoming silicon defects in monolithic 3d.

As dimensional scaling has reached the diminishing return era there is a buildup of interest in monolithic 3D as an alternative path forward. Both memory and logic vendors are moving to monolithic 3D. The memory vendors are in transition to 3D NAND and Samsung has already announced mass production of their V-NAND. BeSang has been working in monolithic 3D memory for many years and has recently signed a license agreement with SK Hynix. And now, in the logic arena, Qualcomm has voiced a call for monolithic 3D “to extend the semiconductor roadmap way beyond the 2D scaling.” The reason is economic: … “although we are still scaling down, it’s not cost-economic anymore” (Karim Arabi, DAC 2014).

A key aspect of monolithic 3D is engineering the second layer to be especially thin, on the order of 100nm or less. This provides for tiny (10s of nm diameter) vertical connections which are dense, manufacturable, and stress-free.  They can be manufactured with well understood processing as these vertical connections would look very much like the metal to metal vias that the industry has been making for decades. This avoids the 10+ micron sized TSVs of parallel 3D and their associated reliability hazards, process cost, Keep Out Zones, and ‘newness risk’.

When performance is important, single crystal silicon based transistors are the way to go for stacked layers. So far, it seems that the best technique to form such thin mono-crystal layers with the required thickness control is to use the volume production and well proven ion-cut process. Many of the high performance monolithic 3D process flows utilize ion-cut techniques, sometimes called ‘Smart-Cut’.

However, use of ion-cut creates a small number of crystal defects in the very thin single crystal layer-transferred film. I’ll talk about some techniques that may be employed to solve this but, first, let’s explore why defects are created in the ion-cut process.

The high dosage of ions used in the process creates damage to the silicon lattice at, and near, the ion-stopping depth, such that the lattice becomes brittle there; hence, can be ‘cut’ or ‘exfoliated’ with a force (e.g., knife, water jet) or thermal anneal. After separation of the layer to be transferred from the donor substrate, this ‘donor layer’ will still have some of the silicon lattice damage from the embrittlement on one surface, and may also have some damage from the splitting process itself. Soitec, in the manufacture of SOI wafers, utilizes 1100-1200°C thermal anneals (both oxidizing and non-oxidizing) in combination with chemical-mechanical polishing (CMP) to repair the crystalline damage, as part of its SmartCut (ion-cut) process. However, these damage repair anneals are not compatible with the commonly used low melting point/hi-diffusivity interconnect metals like copper or aluminum of the lower device layer in a 3D stack. BeSang has a nice tutorial video explaining this on their website. Here’s a snapshot:

Further, the passage of the ions used in the ion-cut process creates a lower level of damage to the silicon lattice of the bulk of the to-be-transferred donor layer as the ions pass thru the lattice. This bulk lattice damage can cause junction leakage, and lower the performance of devices. Annealing this type of lattice damage requires temperatures of about 600°C or greater, which – again – is incompatible with the commonly used interconnect metals of the lower device layers in a 3D stack.

Now let’s look at two silicon device proven methods that are available to overcome the ion-cut induced defects and can be applied to the ion-cut layer transfer for monolithic 3D devices and  structures.

Radu et al. of Soitec, in U.S. Patent Application Publication 2013/0026663, describe a method for curing defects associated with ion-cut implantation by a CMP and then a laser anneal of the transferred singe crystal silicon layer.

Singe crystal silicon donor wafer 1 is ion-implanted with a heavy dose of hydrogen or helium ions to create a brittle region 11 as shown in Fig. 1A. Then the donor wafer is flipped over and bonded to the top of a receiver substrate 2 that may have transistors and interconnect metallization 20, shown in Fig. 1B. Layer 3 is a low thermal conductivity or thermal insulating layer that will help thermally protect the transistors and interconnect metallization 20 of substrate 2.

Fracturing along the brittle region 11 may be done with any number of techniques, such as mechanical knife, water or gas jet, etc., leaving behind transferred silicon layer 10. The transferred layer surface 12 may be CMP’d to remove the majority of the roughness and surface defects, resulting in Fig. 1C.

However, there are still bulk lattice damage centers in transferred silicon layer 10. Radu et al. takes care of them thermally by applying pulses of electromagnetic energy. Specifically mentioned are the pulsed lasers of Excico and JPSA.

The wavelength of the irradiation is chosen such that the majority of the pulsed energy is absorbed in transferred layer 10. The low thermal conductivity or thermal insulating layer 3 minimizes the thermal diffusion from the heated transferred layer 10 to the interconnect metallization and must be designed properly to handle the thermal pulse of the layer above. Temperatures high enough to cure the ion-cut induced defects and reactivate any ion-cut deactivated dopants in transferred layer 10 can be achieved. For example, as Figs. 5A and B show, the transferred thin (0.8um in this case) silicon layer (a) may achieve a temperature well above 1000°C from the laser pulse, and the interface (b) between substrate 2 and thermal insulating layer 3 will stay well below 400°C.

Fig. 5A shows the JPSA laser at 193nm and 20ns pulse FWHM (Full-Width Half-Max) and Fig. 5B shows the Excico laser at 308nm and 160ns pulse FWHM.

We have also published work on laser annealing at 2013 IEEE 3DIC and 2013 IEEE S3S Conferences showing how scaling trends can make monolithic 3D practical and the substantial design space of the laser wavelength/energy/pulse width, top layer thickness, and shielding/thermal protection layers which can make single crystal monolithic 3D possible.

Clearly, stacking of ultra-thin layers of defect free single crystal silicon can be readily accomplished and the tools to realize this are available from at least two vendors.

At ESSDERC (43rd Solid State Device Research Conference) in September of 2013, Radu et al. in collaboration with CEA-Leti, presented a different way of obtaining low defect single crystal silicon stacks. Low temperature Solid Phase Epitaxial Re-grow (SPER) is combined with ion-cut to demonstrate defect free diodes with processing temperatures less than 500°C.

SPER utilizes a small amount of crystalline silicon as a template to re-crystallize an amorphous silicon layer at temperatures just above 475°C and can be used to activate dopants above the solubility limit.

SPER can be combined with low temperature ion-cut (SmartCut) and bonding techniques to obtain defect free single crystal devices. Donor wafer doped silicon is amorphized before bonding and ion-cut implanted to create the brittle zone, flipped and bonded to the handle, SPER processed, and then thinned to remove the End Of Range defects.

No crystalline defects were seen utilizing the usual physical means:

However, the tougher test to satisfy is always the electrical one. Radu showed excellent diode characteristics, resistivity, concentration and mobility recovery. Here are some of their diode I(V) curves:

I would not be surprised if demonstration of transistors is published in the near future.

So, hopefully I have given you at taste of how ready an important piece of the monolithic 3D puzzle is to delivering on its promises. Back in December 2013, Soitec and CEA-Leti renewed their long-standing partnership for five additional years. I think it is safe to say that more will be coming soon.

Give me a call or email if you want to talk more…

Monolithic 3D moving forward for SoC and logic devices. The latest news in the semiconductor industry reveals an important strategic relationship between Qualcomm Technologies and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation SMIC. The latest is one of the leading semiconductor foundries in the world and the largest and most advanced foundry in mainland China. "SMIC is further strengthening its strategic relationship with Qualcomm Technologies. SMIC will work with Qualcomm Technologies in bringing new 28nm design-ins and products for the growing mobile communication industry. Going forward, SMIC will also extend its technology offerings on 3D IC and RF front-end wafer manufacturing in support of Qualcomm Technologies". As Zvi Or-Bach, Presindet and CEO of MonolithIC 3D Inc. recently reported in our blog: "Qualcomm Calls for Monolithic 3D IC", first developing EDA with help of Georgia Tech., than support the process development at CEA Leti, and now setting up volume production with SMIC. This is the first announcement of moving to monolithic 3D for SoC and logic devices after Samsung already reported mass production of for monolithic 3D in first 3D vertical NAND flash.

Source:

- SMIC and Qualcomm Collaborate on 28nm Wafer Production in China – Solid State Magazine [http://electroiq.com/blog/2014/07/smic-and-qualcomm-collaborate-on-28nm-wafer-production-in-china/];

- China's SMIC-Qualcomm 28-nm Deal: Why Now? - EE Times [http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1322988&piddl_msgid=306046#msg_306046];

We have a guest contribution from Zvi Or-Bach, the President and CEO of MonolithIC 3D Inc. Mr. Or-Bach discusses about the latest news shared by Qualcomm.

"Qualcomm is looking to monolithic 3D and smart circuit architectures to make up for the loss of traditional 2D process scaling as wafer costs for advanced nodes continue to increase." Speaking in a keynote at DAC 2014 in San Francisco, vice president of engineering Karim Arabi, is reported to argue that 3D and EDA need to make up for Moore’s Law.This was the third time in the past year that Qualcomm executives have made such a call at major industry conferences. At IEDM 2013 Geoffrey Yeap, Qualcomm VP of Technology, stated in his invited talk: "As performance mismatch between transistors and interconnects continue to increase, designs have become interconnect-limited. Monolithic 3D (M3D) is an emerging integration technology poised to reduce the gap significantly between transistors and interconnect delays to extend the semiconductor roadmap way beyond the 2D scaling trajectory predicted by Moore’s Law." Yeap provided the following chart for the growing gap between transistor delay and interconnect delay

Earlier that year, Robert Gilmore, Qualcomm VP Engineering, in his invited talk at VLSI 2013 (Kyoto, Japan), used almost the same words and provided the following illustration (note the wafer is face-down):

Clearly there seems to be a concentrated effort by Qualcomm to promote the development and adoption of monolithic 3D.

Qualcomm has done more than just talking. It has been investing in monolithic 3D development tools with institutions such as Georgia Tech (see their GTCAD LAB website reporting technology transfer in 2012 and 2014). Qualcomm has been filing patents in this area and recently announced an agreement to work with CEA-Leti - Qualcomm to Evaluate Leti’s Non-TSV 3D Process

It would seem that the number one motivation behind these efforts is Qualcomm’s concern about future cost reductions. Early in 2012 Jim Clifford, Qualcomm's VP and GM (at that time), in his plenary talk at the SPIE conference titled - A Mobile Wireless Phenomenon: A Continued Need for Advanced Lithography, made it very clear with his second slide. At that time there were already some concerns with EUV’s rollout schedule. Jim called on the conference attendees to make sure to solve the escalation of advanced lithography cost, which was already dominating more than 50 % of the overall advanced device cost. Jim presented the following curve, showing the historical 29% cost reduction per year, and the looming problem with the production cost beyond 28 nm.

 Jim than said: "If the next node doesn't cost less than the last node we got a problem because I don't think the demand will be there." Well it is now clear that EUV is not ready and that dimensional scaling below 28nm will require double and triple lithography with its associated extra costs.

Back to the DAC 2014 keynote: Arabi explained: “Mobile is becoming a centre of gravity for the user. It is providing a unique opportunity ... but it becomes a challenge to develop because you have to integrate them at lower power and low cost as well ... One of the biggest problems is cost. We are very cost sensitive. Moore’s Law has been great. Now, although we are still scaling down, it’s not cost-economic anymore. It’s creating a big problem for us.” As we reported in our recent blog, 28nm – The Last Node of Moore's Law, dimensional scaling below 28 nm will result in increasing device cost. This was echoed multiple times at this DAC by other keynote speakers such as Hossein Yassaie, CEO of Imagination Technologies, who said: “Moore’s Law is really over from my point of view. It’s not that it can’t scale, it’s that the cost is not going down anymore".

 And cost is not the only problem with dimensional scaling. The following IBM slide illustrates that interconnect now dominates device power.   

Interconnect’s effect on power is just getting worse with dimensional scaling. Arabi also stated in his DAC keynote: “Interconnect RC is inching up as we go to deeper technology. That is a major problem because designs are becoming interconnect-dominated. Something has to be done about interconnect. What needs to be done is monolithic three-dimensional ICs ... So we are looking at true monolithic 3D. You have normal vias between different stacks. Then interconnect lengths will be smaller than with 2D. If we can connect between layers the delay becomes smaller. This is a technology for the end of the decade, but it can give us an advantage of one process node, with a 30 per cent power saving and a 40 per cent gain in performance.”

Clearly, monolithic 3D integration has a very important role for the future of the semiconductor industry. It is therefore fitting that the traditional IEEE conference on SOI has extended its scope and now calls itself S3S: SOI technology, 3D Integration, and Subthreshold Microelectronics. The 2014 S3S conference is scheduled for October 6-9, 2014 at the Westin San Francisco Airport. This would be a great opportunity to learn more about monolithic 3D technology with 5 invited presentations covering topics from design tools to monolithic 3D NAND and other 3D memories, CEA Leti will present their work on CMOS monolithic 3D IC, and researchers from MIT and Stanford will present manufacturing monolithic 3D devices with materials other than silicon.

We have a guest contribution from Zvi Or-Bach, the President and CEO of MonolithIC 3D Inc. Mr. Or-Bach discusses about the latest news in support of monolithic 3d.

Over the course of three major industry conferences (VLSI 2013, IEDM 2013 and DAC 2014), executives of Qualcomm voiced a call for monolithic 3D "to extend the semiconductor roadmap way beyond the 2D scaling" as part of their keynote presentations.  
Karim Arabi, Qualcomm VP of Engineering, voiced the strongest support and provided many details of monolithic 3D’s role, in his keynote at this year’s DAC. A good summary was posted at the Tech Design Forums site under the title "3D and EDA need to make up for Moore’s Law, says Qualcomm". In this blog I’ll highlight some of the very interesting quotes from Arabi’s keynote: "Qualcomm is looking to monolithic 3D and smart circuit architectures to make up for the loss of traditional 2D process scaling as wafer costs for advanced nodes continue to increase...One of the biggest problems is cost. We are very cost sensitive. Moore’s Law has been great. Now, although we are still scaling down, it’s not cost-economic anymore"

Karim Arabi, Qualcomm VP of Engineering, voiced the strongest support and provided many details of monolithic 3D’s role, in his keynote at this year’s DAC. A good summary was posted at the Tech Design Forums site under the title "3D and EDA need to make up for Moore’s Law, says Qualcomm". In this blog I’ll highlight some of the very interesting quotes from Arabi’s keynote: "Qualcomm is looking to monolithic 3D and smart circuit architectures to make up for the loss of traditional 2D process scaling as wafer costs for advanced nodes continue to increase...One of the biggest problems is cost. We are very cost sensitive. Moore’s Law has been great. Now, although we are still scaling down, it’s not cost-economic anymore"

Qualcomm is not the only fabless company voicing its concern with cost. Early in 2013 Nvidia said it is "deeply unhappy" and executives of Broadcom followed suite. The following chart, presented by ARM, illustrates it nicely.

But it seems that the problem is even more severe than that. In our blog Moore’s Law has stopped at 28nm we examined the expected increase of SoC cost due to poor scaling of embedded SRAM (eSRAM). We should note that the chart above, like many others, is about the cost per transistor associated with dimensional scaling. Escalating lithography cost causes escalating wafer cost, which neutralizes the 2X transistor density increases.

Yet eSRAM scales far less than 2X and, accordingly, for most SOCs, scaling would be even more costly. This issue has been confirmed again with the recent VLSI 2014 paper "10-nm Platform Technology Featuring FinFET on Bulk and SOI" by Samsung, IBM, STMicroelectronics, GLOBALFOUNDRIES and UMC. They presented that the size of their 10 nm bitcell is 0.053 µm², which is only 25% smaller than the 0.07 µm² reported for 14 nm bitcell size. One should expect that an additional area penalty would occur for effective use in large memory blocks, as reported even for 14nm, which could bring the effective SRAM scaling to only about 15%, a long way from the 50% required to neutralize the escalating wafer costs. 

However, cost is not the only issue that forced Qualcomm to consider monolithic 3D. Quoting Arabi:
“Interconnect RC is inching up as we go to deeper technology. That is a major problem because designs are becoming interconnect-dominated. Something has to be done about interconnect. What needs to be done is monolithic three-dimensional ICs. Through-silicon vias and micro bumps are useful where you need I/Os ... But they are not really solving the interconnect issue I’m talking about ... So we are looking at true monolithic 3D. You have normal vias between different stacks. Then interconnect lengths will be smaller than with 2D. If we can connect between layers the delay becomes smaller." 

The interconnect issue was also addressed at IEDM 2013 by Geoffrey Yeap, Qualcomm VP of Technology, in his invited talk:
"As performance mismatch between transistors and interconnects continue to increase, designs have become interconnect-limited. Monolithic 3D (M3D) is an emerging integration technology poised to reduce the gap significantly between transistors and interconnect delays to extend the semiconductor roadmap way beyond the 2D scaling trajectory predicted by Moore’s Law."
Yeap provided the following chart for the growing gap between transistor delay and interconnect delay:

Arabi DAC 2014 keynote was also reported on Cadence’s website, which provides our final Arabi quote for this blog: Qualcomm is looking at "monolithic" 3D-ICs that use normal vias between stacked dies. This can provide a one-process-node advantage along with a 30% power savings, 40% performance gain, and 5-10% cost savings.

Clearly, monolithic 3D integration has a very important role in the future of the semiconductor industry. It is therefore fitting that the traditional IEEE conference on SOI has extended its scope and now calls itself S3S: SOI technology, 3D Integration, and Subthreshold Microelectronics. The 2014 S3S conference is scheduled for October 6-9, 2014 at the Westin San Francisco Airport. This would be a great opportunity to learn more about monolithic 3D technology, with 5 invited presentations covering topics from design tools to monolithic 3D NAND and other 3D memories. CEA Leti will present their work on CMOS monolithic 3D IC, and researchers from MIT and Stanford will present manufacturing monolithic 3D devices with materials other than silicon.

MonolithIC 3D Inc. has been honored to be invited to give a Key Note at the ITHERM 2014 with a Plenary Talk. Sponsored by the IEEE’s CPMT Society, ITherm 2014 is an international conference for scientific and engineering exploration of thermal, thermomechanical and emerging technology issues associated with electronic devices, packages and systems. THe ITHerm 2014 was an exciting conference with more than 400 attendies.The company's President and CEO, Mr. Zvi Or-Bach gave a planery talk on "Thermal Issues and Alternative Solution Related to ‘Fabrication’ and ‘Operation’ of Monolithic 3D Ics ".

"Semiconductor industry is facing an inflection point: dimensional scaling has reached diminishing returns", noted Mr. Or-Bach in his presentation. "The next decade of progress would be by scaling up with monolithic 3D technology." Or-Bach Key Note presented why monolithic 3D is next path for progress, why dimension scaling had made monolithic 3D practical, presenting details of three process flow for processing monolithic 3D, and finnaly why monolithic 3D present a new heat removal challange and prctical techniques to overcome this thermal challange. You can access the presentation in our company's webpage under Papers and Presentations Menu, or by clicking here.

The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) 2013 Edition was released in early April 2014. The latest version published adds focus on 3D IC technology.

“The combination of 3D device architecture and low power devices will usher in a new era of scaling identified in short as <<3D Power Scaling>> The increase in the number of transistors per unit area will eventually be accomplished by stacking multiple layers of transistors”

This piece of news was covered in a blog post on the Solid State Technology Magazine emphasizing on the key finding and predictions of the 2013 ITRS.

You can read the entire article on the Solid State Technology Magazine here and read the Executive Summary of the 2013 ITRS here.

We have a guest contribution from Zvi Or-Bach, the President and CEO of MonolithIC 3D Inc. Mr. Or-Bach discusses about the FPGA as ASIC Alternative. 

In our recent blog 28nm – The Last Node of Moore's Law we outlined the recent dramatic change that has happened after many years of cost reduction associated with dimensional scaling. It is clear now that 28 nm will provide the lowest cost per gate for years to come. In this blog we will assess the potential implications for the ASIC and the FPGA markets. Over the last two decades we have seen escalating mask set costs associated with dimensional scaling and accordingly escalating NRE costs. At the recent 2014 SEMI Industry Strategy Symposium (ISS) Ivo Bolsens, Xilinx CTO, presented the following chart of ASIC design cost escalation: 

The dramatic increases of ASIC design cost have had a real effect on the ASIC market, reducing the number of new designs and dramatically reducing the number of vendors serving the ASIC market.

One would expect that such a trend would have a very positive effect on the FPGA market, as there is no mask-set cost associated with an FPGA design and, accordingly, far lower NRE costs per design. The following fictitious chart presented in the EE Times article: What’s the number of ASIC versus FPGA design starts?, illustrates these expectations.

Surprisingly, this did not really happen. The following chart presents the overall FPGA market during the last decade according to the financial results of Xilinx, Altera and Actel.

The FPGA market growth could be compared to the overall semiconductor market growth as presented in the chart below (the market in 2013 was $305B). Clearly the FPGA market growth during the last decade is similar to the overall semiconductor market growth, and there is no indication of any benefits from the escalating ASIC mask-set cost and its associated NRE.

The FPGA technology started in the mid-1980s as an alternative to the popular ASIC technology then – the Gate Array. The acronym FPGA stands for Field Programmable Gate Array. During the 1990s the Gate Array technology lost its appeal and the ~$20B Gate Array market shrunk dramatically and effectively ceased to exist. Analyst expected that this will have a dramatic positive impact on the FPGA market, which did grow some but far from the expectations. The trend of escalating NRE driven by dimensional scaling and escalating lithography costs kept on going in the 2000s and drove down the number of ASIC designs. And, again, analysts expected a huge surge in the FPGA market. Clearly, this did not happen. 

In the following we will present our theory why it did not happen and some potential implications for the future.

We believe that the stagnation of FPGA growth is mostly due to the inefficiency of the FPGA technology. Most FPGAs use SRAM as the programming or ‘switch’ technology. Interconnects are the dominating resource in modern designs. Within an SRAM based FPGA the programming of interconnects is implemented by an SRAM cell control of a pass transistor, driver, or bidirectional driver. The following chart illustrates the diffusion area associated for such Programmable Interconnect Cell (PIC) assessed in 45nm technology and compared to the size of mask-defined equivalent – the via. The results indicate that the cell area overhead for the SRAM PIC is over 30X when compared to a via, which does not include the additional circuit overhead area needed to program and control the SRAM PIC.

This number had been reported in the industry for many years. A 2007 research paper by Ian Kuon and Prof Jonathan Rose (IEEE Transaction on Computer-Aided Design of IC and System) says this clearly: “In this paper, we have presented empirical measurements quantifying the gap between FPGAs and ASICs for core logic. We found that for circuits implemented purely using the LUT based logic elements, an FPGA is approximately 35 times larger and between 3.4 to 4.6 times slower on average than a standard-cell implementation.”

This high programmability overhead suggests that many of the current ASIC designs cannot be replaced by an FPGA design. Consequently, when advanced technology NRE is too high, the alternative is to use older node ASIC technologies. Since the number one driver for cost of mask-sets and NRE is the associated capital, the cost of older technologies goes down dramatically over time. The 30X area penalty means that one could use a node that is five generations older and have a competitive solution when compared to current node FPGA. Taking into account the 60% gross margin of the FPGA companies and the overhead of using a fixed-sized device of an FPGA family rather than a custom tailored Standard Cell device, these could compensate for an additional two nodes. Looking again at the design costs as illustrated in the Xilinx chart above, we can see that at 180 nm the design costs are pretty low and the mask set costs are too small even to register on the chart.

What has really happened is that many designs chose to use older node standard cells instead of an FPGA. In his last keynote presentation at the Synopsys user group (SNUG 2014) Art De Geus, Synopsys CEO, presented multiple slides to illustrate the value of Synopsys newer tools to improve older node design effectiveness. The following chart is one of them and it also includes in its left side the current distribution of design starts. One can easily see that the most popular current design node is at 180nm. Clearly even such old node provides a better product than the state of the art FPGA.  

Now we understand why the escalating mask set and NRE costs have not resulted in a surge of FPGA designs but rather pushed designers to user older technology nodes that had depreciated enough to make their NRE cost less of an issue. The following chart of Design Starts per Node by IBS was recently presented in a Synopsys article "The new landscape of advanced design". It shows the design starts trend over time and, not surprisingly, indicates that designers migrate to more advanced nodes over a longer time and that the up and coming node these days is just 65 nm.

Recently EE Times published our blog, 28nm – The Last Node of Moore's Law. In it we presented that the 28nm node will be the end of cost reduction for dimensional scaling. Most analysts accept by now that 28 nm is going to be the lowest cost per gate for many years to come. 

There are potentially many implications of this change in Moore’s Law. One of those implications could affect the future of FPGAs.
Traditionally FPGAs have been, and still are, a technology driver of new logic technology nodes. This early adoption gave the FPGA customer a constantly better programmable platform for their designs. Now that dimensional scaling does not provide better cost, it will result in a build-up of pressure for FPGA customers to use a depreciated technology node as an alternative. Over time designers would see the NRE of 65nm going down to about what the 180nm NRE is today. Comparing a 65nm Standard Cell design to an FPGA of 28nm suggests that far more designs could be better off with Standard Cell. As 20 nm and 14 nm FPGAs would not provide a better cost than the 28 nm one, it means that the FPGA market could see a growing challenge in the coming years. 
 
Designers chose older nodes not just for its lower mask-set and NRE costs but also for availability of broader embedded options such as flash memories and analog cells. But those are becoming available on newer nodes over time as well. The 65 nm node is now ramping up and would become the preferred choice for new designs in a few years, as its mask-set cost and NRE keep going down thanks to deprecation and broader availability. As volume production of older designs winds down, vendors are reducing their costs to bring new designs in, and will soon make the 65 nm as easy to access as 180 nm is now. FPGA vendors will release newer products on 20nm and 14nm but those would not offer lower production costs than the 28 nm FPGA products and will be less and less competitive versus a ‘not too old’ technology node such as 65 nm. It only seems logical that these new semiconductor industry dynamics will have a negative effect on the FPGA market and a positive effect on ASIC and Structured ASIC technologies. 

Thus it behooves us to consider what can the FPGA vendors do to keep their business growth.
Interestingly, the same trend that now works against FPGA technologies could be used to improve their competitiveness. In the early days two major FPGA technologies were competing in the market. The SRAM technology and the anti-fuse technology. The SRAM technology had higher switch overhead, but ended up winning because it benefitted from two major advantages. First, it did not need any major process changes and could be adapted to newer nodes as soon as those could be fabricated. Second was their ability to reprogram the device over and over again. Now that new process nodes do not provide lower costs, FPGA vendors could look to other than SRAM technology as a new path to improve their programmable platforms. As for anti-fuse, the significant effort in recent years to develop RRAM technology opens the possibility of adopting antifuse technology that could offer re-programmability. Even more important is the fact that re-programmability these days is far less important as all FPGA designs utilize simulation technology and other EDA tools, as the trial and error methodology no longer can be effectively used for modern designs. 

A special type of antifuse programmable technology could be most effective – Antifuse-based 3D High Density FPGA. This type of programmable fabric leverages anti-fuse metal to metal technology, which use 3D transistors for programming the anti-fuses. The 3D transistors could handle the higher voltage required for the programming and provide the interconnect programming with minimal device density impact. The 3D anti-fuse programmable fabric density is very similar to a via programmable fabric. Via programmable fabrics has been used with structured ASICs such as those offered by eASIC and Triad Semiconductors (ViASIC). They provide a programmable fabric with about a 2X area penalty vs. mask-defined standard cell technologies. These antifuses could be made as one time or reprogrammable devices and be fully replaced by mask-defined vias for even lower cost volume production, as illustrated by the following chart

Going forward, the semiconductor industry needs to go through fundamental change. No longer is it sufficient to scale using the next node of dimensional scaling to provide better overall device value. From the 28 nm node going forward, the industry needs to open up for a broad range of innovation so to continue offering better products. We can only hope that this will drive the industry back to fast growth and support the future market of Internet-of-Things and Internet-of-Everything.