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I recently visited the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and gave a presentation. It was a fun experience, let me describe it... Like I said in my last blog-post, I’m at IITC this week. The keynote speech of the conference was given by Dirk Wristers, VP of Technology & Integration at Globalfoundries. It was quite interesting, let me share some details... I'll be traveling to Dresden, Germany next week for the Interconnect Interconnect Technology Conference (IITC). Thought I should give a preview of the conference... For the past 40 years, semiconductor technologists relied on improvements in lithography to "cram more components onto integrated circuits". Toshiba, Samsung and other non-volatile memory companies are betting the future will be different. Let's look at the fascinating idea they're pursuing... Believe it or not, the answer is "TRUE"!  Who did it? It was Matrix Semiconductor, a Silicon Valley startup, who shipped the world's first monolithic 3D products in 2003. These were One-Time Programmable (OTP) non-volatile memory chips that had multiple layers of polysilicon diodes in series with antifuses. See picture alongside. As many of you know, repeaters are gates that are inserted in the middle of long wires to speed them up. Let's discuss these interesting devices... Transistor = Bardeen, Brattain & Shockley; IC = Kilby & Noyce; DRAM = Dennard; Flash = Masuoka; 3D Stacking = Who?? 3D stacked integrated circuits are on the roadmaps of most logic, flash and DRAM vendors today. In 10 years time, we will have seen widespread adoption of this technology. Shouldn’t we know who invented or talked about 3D Stacking first? After all, this technology is going to have a huge impact on our lives… 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... 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? |
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