IBM Moves Moore's Law to the Third Dimension
IBM has announced a new breakthrough in chip-stacking technology in a manufacturing environment that paves the way for three-dimensional chips...
"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 release states that IBM is already running chips using the new through-silicon via technology in house and that the company will begin making sample chips using the tech available to customers in the second half of this year, with production in 2008. The first application of through-silicon via technology will be in wireless communications chips that will go into power amplifiers for wireless LAN and cellular devices.
