IBM Moves Moore's Law to the Third Dimension

by Marco Chiappetta — Thursday, April 12, 2007, 01:30 PM EDT

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.

Tags: IBM, Men, law, move, Moore's Law, IM

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com