We have a blog post today from Zvi Or-Bach, the President and CEO of MonolithIC 3D Inc. As many of you know, MonolithIC 3D Inc. was called NuPGA not so long ago, and had a name change in March 2011. Zvi explains the thinking behind our new name...
We already explained why we decided to change our company name. But why did we choose to replace a short name with such a long name with so many syllables??
To better explain this choice of ours, let’s start with a story that describes events on January 29th, 2010. We gave an invited paper at the 3D Interconnect: Shaping Future Technology, 2010 IEEE SCV-EDS/Applied Materials Technical Symposium. With us, C. Raman Kothandaraman of IBM gave a presentation titled: "Through Silicon Via (TSV) for 3D integration". Dr. Kothandaraman started by apologizing for the redundancy in his presentation title - "If 3D Integration then it is TSV"!
Clearly nobody then or even now could imagine any way to build a 3D-IC, other than by using TSVs. This industry view was verified by our team over and over again at various conferences.
At MonolithIC 3D, we made our first breakthrough in mid-2009 and since then, working in stealth mode, our team was able to develop a range of monolithic 3D technologies for logic, memory and other fabrics. In fact, since then we have filed more than 30 patent applications on these monolithic 3D technologies.
Now, that we are no longer in stealth mode, we realized that our first challenge is to make the industry aware that the monolithic 3D-IC is available and practical. Picking the name “MonolithIC 3D” is our first step toward this end.