3D chips

IBM today announced a chip-stacking technology that paves the way for engineers to build three-dimensional chips. The technology called "through-silicon vias" - allows different chip components to be packaged much closer together for faster, smaller, and lower-power systems.

The IBM breakthrough enables the move from horizontal 2-D chip layouts to 3-D chip stacking, which takes chips and memory devices that traditionally sit side by side on a silicon wafer and stacks them together on top of one another. The result is a compact sandwich of components that dramatically reduces the size of the overall chip package and boosts the speed at which data flows among the functions on the chip.

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.

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 server and supercomputing chips that power the world’s business, government and scientific efforts.

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.