The company has announced a new chip-stacking technology in a manufacturing environment that paves the way for three dimensional chips.
IBM says the new technology will have far reaching implications, particularly for mobile devices, by allowing processors and memory that are smaller, faster, and consume less power.
Called ‘through-silicon vias’ technology, the breakthrough enables the move from horizontal two-dimensional chip layouts to 3-D chip stacking, taking chips and memory devices that traditionally sit side by side on a silicon wafer and stacks them on top of one another.
The result is a compact sandwich of components that reduces the size of the chip package, boosting the speed at which data flows among the functions on the chip.
“This breakthrough is a result of more than a decade of pioneering research at IBM,” IBM Semiconductor Research and Development Centre vice-president Lisa Su said. “This allows us to move 3-D chips from the 'lab to the fab' across a range of applications.”
The new IBM method eliminates the need for long-metal wires that connect today’s 2-D chips together, instead relying on through-silicon vias, which are essentially vertical connections etched through the silicon wafer and filled with metal. These vias allow multiple chips to be stacked together, allowing greater amounts of information to be passed between the chips.
The technique shortens the distance information on a chip needs to travel by 1000 times, and allows for the addition of up to 100 times more channels, or pathways, for that information to flow compared to 2-D chips.
IBM is already running chips using the through-silicon via technology in its manufacturing line and will begin making sample chips using this method available to customers in the second half of 2007, with production in 2008.
The first application of this through-silicon via technology will be in wireless communications chips that will go into power amplifiers for wireless LAN and cellular applications. 3-D technology will also be applied to a wide range of chips, including those running now in IBM’s high-performance servers and supercomputers.
In particular, IBM is applying the new through-silicon-via technique in wireless communications chips, Power processors, Blue Gene supercomputer chips, and in high-bandwidth memory applications.
This is the fifth major chip breakthrough in five months from IBM, as it leads the industry in its quest for new materials and architectures to extend Moore’s Law.
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