IBM has found a way to connect chips inside products ranging from cellphones to supercomputers, an advance that promises to prolong battery life in wireless devices and eventually speed data transfers between the processor and memory chips in computers, the company said yesterday.
The manufacturing technique outlined by IBM Corp eliminates the long metal wires that are currently used to transfer information and electrical charge between chips.
The memory and processor chips are often spaced inches apart from each other, causing a lag in transmission as chipmakers multiply the number and voracity of calculating cores on their processors.
Slowdowns crop up when data-hungry processors cannot retrieve information fast enough from memory to perform their increasingly complex functions.
IBM's solution was to sandwich the two chips on top of one another -- the distance between them measured in microns, or millionths of a meter -- and held together by vertical connections that are etched in silicon holes that are filled with metal.
The vertical connections are referred to as "through-silicon-vias," which allow multiple chips to be stacked together with greater information flow between them. IBM said its three-dimensional approach creates the possibility of up to 100 times more pathways for information, and shortens by 1,000 times the distance that information on a chip needs to travel.
"This is a big step, this is a really historic move," said David Lammers, director of WeSRCH.com, a social networking Web site for semiconductor enthusiasts and part of VLSI Research Inc. "This has been studied to death, but it's the first time a company is saying, `We can connect two chips in the vertical direction.'"
While it has the most promise for use in computers, IBM's technology will initially be used in wireless communications chips when production begins next year. Stacked chips are already used in cellphones, but IBM's technology eliminates the need for wires wrapped around the outside of the chips.
The company said it could have memory-on-processor technology by 2009 for use in servers, supercomputers and other machines.
"We are continuing to innovate -- now we have a new degree of freedom to get more functionality out of chips," said Lisa Su, vice president for semiconductor research and development at IBM.
Stacking chips three-dimensionally can become problematic because of the intricacy of etching holes directly into the silicon, and because processors kick off so much heat, they can disrupt the normal functioning of the memory when attached so closely to it, according to analysts and IBM competitors.
Intel used a similar three-dimensional structure in a research processor demonstrated in February that can perform about a trillion calculations per second. Such a computer chip can perform calculations as quickly an entire data center while consuming as much energy as a light bulb.
However, Jerry Bautista, director of technology management for Intel's Microprocessor Technology Lab, said such an approach is "much more aggressive and risky" for production on a wide scale.
He said Intel was still researching its options and has not said when it might make such a technology available.
"We have a view that while 3-D stacking is very elegant, it's not for the faint of heart," Bautista said.
"You better think hard about how you do it, because it's not a slam dunk," he said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts