IBM Extends Moore's Law to the Third Dimension

[popopot]

From: http://www.physorg.com/news95575580.html

IBM today announced a breakthrough chip-stacking technology in a manufacturing environment that paves the way for three-dimensional chips that will extend Moore’s Law beyond its expected limits. 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.

“This breakthrough is a result of more than a decade of pioneering research at IBM,” said Lisa Su, vice president, Semiconductor Research and Development Center, IBM. “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.

More at the link above.

[Seedler]

we're gunna see a 666 ghz cpu sometime soon.

They already made a 500 ghz one me thinks.

[lynx]

I've been expecting this for some time, though I don't know enough about the process to understand how it is achieved.

I would think that the centre of this system could potentially get pretty hot though. How would you cool something like that? You would need something that could pass through at a molecular level - how about Hydrogen?

Mind you, in that case overclocking might be a risky business - nuclear fusion, ftw.

[Virtualbody1234]

I've been expecting this for some time, though I don't know enough about the process to understand how it is achieved.

I would think that the centre of this system could potentially get pretty hot though. How would you cool something like that? You would need something that could pass through at a molecular level - how about Hydrogen?

Mind you, in that case overclocking might be a risky business - nuclear fusion, ftw.

Boom!

[Shiranai_Baka]

ten years to think of stacking chips to increase performance? isn't that a little unimpressive?

[popopot]

I remember at work that people are/were trying to connect two cpus together using liquid crystals. I don't think its working yet and it sounds like they have been beaten to the punch.

[Seedler]

They could just train a whole bunch of FOB asians to be even more preficient at calculations... 500TFLOPS per person.

[lynx]

They could just train a whole bunch of FOB asians to be even more preficient at calculations... 500TFLOPS per person.

Are they stackable too?

[Seedler]

They could just train a whole bunch of FOB asians to be even more preficient at calculations... 500TFLOPS per person.

Are they stackable too?

I think so, overheating must be a problem tho. Server space is limited these days. A dual-core FOB III processor take up almost a square meter.