Blog Archives

When I discuss 3D-ICs with people, they almost always bring up heat removal and power delivery, and ask me how to deal with these issues. Let's address the power delivery issue with this blog-post...

Guest Contribution: How can 3D be cheaper? Isn't it twice the cost?

03/24/2011

We have a guest article today from Brian Cronquist, VP of Technology at MonolithIC 3D Inc. Brian has 30 years of global experience on “both sides of the silicon wafer table”: starting and building Chartered Semiconductor (Singapore) technology and customers as a captive then pure foundry, and non-volatile FPGA technology at Actel as a fabless partner and customer to over 7 foundries and IDMs. He discusses cost implications of Monolithic 3D.

Jack Kilby, Bob Noyce and the 3D Integrated Circuit

03/21/2011

The first (2D) Integrated Circuits were not monolithic. In fact, they had hand-soldered interconnects between circuit components. Let's fast-forward 50 years to the time of the 3D Integrated Circuit... the first 3D-ICs are not monolithic either. Will history repeat itself? Will the monolithic idea win?

Guest Contribution: Equipment Depreciation and Monolithic 3D

03/17/2011

We have a blog post today from Israel Beinglass, the CTO of MonolithIC 3D Inc. Israel spent almost 20 years at Applied Materials, and was Chief Technology Officer, Chief Marketing Officer and General Manager at various divisions there. Israel gives us a "fab-equipment perspective" on Monolithic 3D technology.

3D: Hot or Cool?

03/14/2011

Whenever I discuss 3D with someone, the first question they ask is: Can we really cool these things? Will this technology be useful at all? Thought I should post on the topic...

It's easy to understand why heat removal is an issue for 3D: if you stack two chips of power density PD atop each other, the net power density doubles and becomes 2*PD. Furthermore, one of the chips is far away from the heat sink, making heat removal even more difficult. Several solutions to this problem exist; I'm going to summarize them below.

Guest Contribution: Entanglement Squared, by Zvi Or-Bach

03/14/2011

We have a guest contribution today from Zvi Or-Bach, the President and CEO of MonolithIC 3D Inc. It describes Zvi's perspective on the ASIC industry, and his thoughts on where it is going. If you have comments or questions, please use the "comments" section of the blog - Zvi will respond.

Entanglement Squared
"In quantum entanglement, two objects are connected by an invisible wave, like an umbilical cord, that allows them to essentially share the same existence. When something happens to one object, it immediately happens to the other, no matter how far apart they are."

Whether there actually is an entanglement or it is just a coincidence, the lithography challenge and the interconnect challenge seem to be affecting the semiconductor industry in coordination.

From NuPGA to MonolithIC 3D Inc.

03/08/2011

We changed our company name from NuPGA to MonolithIC 3D last week, and launched our new website. For more details of our name change, check out this link.

I'm hoping to use this blog to convey my impressions of 3D technology, interact with other bloggers and talk about the semiconductor industry in general. Will post at least once a week... My colleagues in Monolithic 3D Inc. will also share their thoughts with this blog. Comments and questions are most welcome; please use the comments section in the blog or e-mail me at deepak@monolithic3D.com.