Monolithic 3D Inc., the Next Generation 3D-IC Company
  • Home
  • Technology
    • Technology
    • Papers, Presentations and Patents
    • Overview >
      • Background
      • Why Monolithic 3D?
      • Paths to Monolithic 3D
      • Applications
    • Ion-Cut: The Building Block
    • Monolithic 3D Logic >
      • RCAT
      • HKMG
      • Laser Annealing
      • RCJLT
      • 3D Embedded RAM
      • 3D Gate Array
      • FPGA
      • Ultra Large Integration - Redundancy and Repair
    • Monolithic 3D Memory >
      • 3D DRAM
      • 3D Resistive Memories
      • 3D Flash
    • Monolithic 3D Electro-Optics >
      • 3D Image Sensors
      • 3D Micro-Displays
  • 3D-IC Edge
    • 3D-IC Edge
  • News & Events
    • News & Events
    • S3S15 Game Change 2.0 Video/P
    • Webcast
    • Webinar
    • Press Releases
    • In the News
    • Upcoming Events
  • About Us
    • About Us
    • History
    • Team
    • Careers
    • Contact Us
  • Blog
  • Simulators

Moore’s law, the bifurcation of the semiconductor industry and 3D devices

6/9/2011

4 Comments

 
Picture
We have a guest contribution today from Israel Beinglass, the CTO of MonolithIC 3D Inc. Israel was at Applied Materials for almost two decades, and served as Chief Technology Officer and Chief Marketing Officer for many groups there. In this blog-post, Israel discusses an interesting trend he sees in the semiconductor industry today.

With all the gloom and doom facing the semiconductor industry and especially with the “end of Moore’s law” coming up soon as many experts predict, let’s look at several facts relating to the unbelievable ride the industry had for the last 40 years.

Moore believed that scientific advances affecting semiconductors could be crucial to economic growth, because an extensive range of applications would be found for more powerful devices in industry, government and national defense
He thought that it would depend on a tradeoff between the pace of scientific advance and the costs of producing more powerful devices.

As the IC industry is progressing and many layers on the silicon chips are approaching atomic scale we might be facing a insurmountable wall that might hamper the future development of the chip technology. Many changes took place in the industry as copper replaced aluminum and CMP was introduced. High k hafnium oxide replaced the traditional silicon dioxide as the basic building block of the transistor (gate), mobility enhancement was obtained by stressors (either dielectric film or selective epitaxial growth in the source/drain area) and of course the tri gate process was debuted by Intel just recentlyes. The transistor of advanced processes today (32nm and below) looks dramatically different from the 130nm transistor of 10 years ago.

The end result of all these is: yes we have better, faster and more advanced devices ( as well as manufacturing facilities) but the cost of manufacturing has gone up dramatically.

However, there is a clear bifurcation in the industry with the rebirth of several “sleepy” technologies that for several years didn’t receive the right attention. By that I’m referring to analog, MEMS and power electronics.

Analog companies like TI, ST, Analog Devices, Infineon are the leaders in that field. The use of analog ICs is increasing in wireless applications. Increasing use of hand held devices (smart phones, tablets and laptops) increases the sale of analog chips. Analog IC technology is playing a key role in wireless systems such as 4G cellular phone systems, wireless sensor networking systems and broadband wireless networking systems. Wireless systems need analog ICs mainly in their transceiver chips for signal processing. Other application areas of analog ICs in wireless systems are wireless data access cards, wireless LAN cards, wireless mouse, wireless repeaters, etc.

The use of power electronics including power transistors, power management devices (used in portable devices, they facilitate addition of more functions while minimizing the battery drain) have been increased dramatically during the last few years as we are becoming a mobile society. The use of hybrid or electric cars, smart grids and solar devices also increases the use of power electronics.

The MEMS industry also has grown dramatically with gyros on hand held devices as well as many types of sensors and microphones. These are all new applications that push the industry in new directions.

The common denominator to all these new applications are relatively small wafers and relaxed design rules. Most of the fabs that are running these products are relatively “old” 6” and 200mm fabs. TI is the only company that has the first 300mm analog fab in Richardson TX. The advantage of these fabs is that they are fully depreciated and the cost of running them is relatively low.

Because of that we see a resurgence in the demand for 200mm wafer fab equipment within the last year that caught all the equipment suppliers by surprise.

So in summary we do see the advancement in process development with shrinking of the device per Moore’s law on one hand and on the other hand a totally different section of the industry that is running on more relaxed design rules with relatively old fabs.

Continuing with Moore law is an extremely expensive proposition especially beyond 22nm, so 3D in a monolithic mode could alleviate some of the problems and will bring some relief to the exorbitant cost of new advanced fab.

I think we can start learning from the way the analog fabs are running their business.

submit to reddit
4 Comments
Nabeeh Kandalaft link
3/8/2012 10:15:47 pm

Very nice article. I think 3D - IC will be the new dramatic turn on the VLSI industry with MEMS technology.

Reply
Sarasota Slip and Fall link
5/7/2012 02:49:16 pm

Nice blog about the semiconductor and how is it beneficial for the scientific industry.Thanks for the information.

Reply
Michael McClary
3/12/2012 08:34:56 am

Granted the scenario was deliberately constructed to parody a 1930s era science fiction vision of an electronic brain (vacuum bottle, red-glowing diamond, silver bus bars, water cooling)- specifically E.E. Smith's Skylark series. But as you can see there's a LOT of room for more transistors in a device if you can reliably and affordably fabricate them in three-D even with feature spacing substantially larger in the additional dimension. B-)

Reply
Michael McClary
3/12/2012 08:51:32 am

The web interface cut off all but my last paragraph. Let's try to reconstruct it...

You beat me to it Nabeeh.

Moore's law is not (just) about feature size. It's about a periodic doubling of the number of transistors that can be fabricated in an affordable integrated circuit. So far that has been accomplished both by decreasing feature size and increasing the size of a die that can be fabricated with acceptable yield. The former may be approaching physical limits but the latter isn't.

In particular, so far integrated circuits have been primarily fabricated as a two-dimensional surface structure. Even multilayer techniques only go a few components deep. Building a true three-dimensional structure with circuitry distributed throughout a volume leaves a lot of room for expansion.

Moore's law has many years to run before it reaches my "Preposterous Scale Integration" scenario: Picture a six-foot cube of diamond (for thermal conductivity) with logic circuitry distributed throughout, two faces powered and cooled by water-cooled silver bus bars, the other four (144 square feet) paved with optic fibers for I/O, running at a dull red glow (not an electrical noise issue with a 5.5V bandgap) in a vacuum bottle (to avoid oxidation, i.e. the diamond catching fire).

Granted the scenario was deliberately constructed to parody a 1930s era science fiction vision of an electronic brain (giant diamond, vacuum bottle, glowing diamond, silver bus bars, water cooling) - specifically E.E. Smith's Skylark series. But as you can see there's a LOT of room for more transistors in a device if you can reliably and affordably fabricate them in three-D even with feature spacing substantially larger in the additional dimension. B-)

Reply

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    Search Blog


    Meet the Bloggers


    Follow us


    To get email updates subscribe here:


    Recommended Links

    3D IC Community
    3D IC LinkedIn Discussion Group

    Recommended Blogs

    • 3D InCites by Francoise von Trapp
    • EDA360 Insider by Steve Leibson
    • Insights From the Leading Edge by Phil Garrou
    • SemiWiki by Daniel Nenni, Paul Mc Lellan, et al.

    Archives

    March 2022
    December 2021
    August 2021
    August 2018
    July 2018
    May 2018
    October 2017
    September 2017
    December 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    August 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    March 2012
    February 2012
    January 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    October 2011
    September 2011
    August 2011
    July 2011
    June 2011
    May 2011
    April 2011
    March 2011

    Categories

    All
    3d Design And Cad
    3dic
    3d Ic
    3d Nand
    3d Stacking
    3d Technology
    Brian Cronquist
    Dean Stevens
    Deepak Sekar
    Dram
    Education
    Heat Removal And Power Delivery
    Industry News
    Israel Beinglass
    Iulia Morariu
    Iulia Tomut
    Monolithic3d
    Monolithic 3d
    MonolithIC 3D Inc.
    Monolithic 3d Inc.
    Monolithic 3d Technology
    Moore Law
    Outsourcing
    Paul Lim
    Repair
    Sandisk
    Semiconductor
    Semiconductor Business
    Tsv
    Zeev Wurman
    Zvi Or Bach
    Zvi Or-Bach

    RSS Feed

© Copyright MonolithIC 3D Inc. , the Next-Generation 3D-IC Company, 2012 - All Rights Reserved, Patents Pending