Semiconductor Design in 3D!

By _Daniel Nenni

June 28, 2010

My vote for most compelling technology at last week’s #47DAC is 3D technology. No, I don’t mean Hollywood-style 3D, I’m talking about vertical stacked-die system on chip design.  This design approach basically means putting different parts of the system on different silicon substrates, so you can use the right technology for each part, and then stack them vertically.

3D technology promises to reduce cost and improve performance.  By putting different parts of the system on a slice of silicon from an optimized process, you don’t have to do things like shoe-horn mixed signal parts into advanced process nodes, which is very expensive and doesn’t really work that well for mixed signal anyway.  Because the interconnect between the silicon slices is very short (due to the stacking), wiring delays are minimized and performance should be very good.