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What is the capital of New York State ?
October 14, 2007
What is the capital of New York State ? An easy question for kids in the North East ...but maybe not so easy for kids in the mid West or the South. I grew up in NYC and never quite understood why Albany was the capital of my birth state. I’m sure that “back in the day”, greed, politics and jealousy over ruled logic when that decision was made. One thing for sure is that NYC is the capital of “going vertical” because real estate prices are so high that vertical is the only way left to go when it comes to new real estate.
So, it would seem only natural that a SEMATECH 3D conference in NY last week would be held in NYC right ???....so of course it was held in Albany.
Actually there was a logical reason for Albany since the SEMATECH 3D program is in the process of moving there. I’m told that three SEMATECH’ers including Larry Smith and Sitaram Arkalgud are in the process of unloading their belongings as you read this blog.
Background:
In 1997, the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), in cooperation with members of the U.S. semiconductor equipment, materials, software and services industry, and the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), launched a new initiative to expand pre-competitive, cooperative, long-range, applied microelectronics research at U.S. universities. This initiative, called the Focus Center Research Program, was structured to address industry and DoD needs using the research university system, i.e. long-range, innovative applied research.
U Albany is a founding member of The National Interconnect Focus Center that was established by the SIA and the DARPA in 1998. The center is a research consortium addressing long-term challenges in the development of next generation computer chips. The University at Albany was designated as the headquarters of the FocusCenter - New York (FC-NY), a partnership between leading research organizations in New York. FC-NY is one of the four primary sites of the InterconnectFocusResearchCenter along with Massachusetts Institute of Technology, StanfordUniversity and the Georgia Institute of Technology. The Interconnect Focus Research Center is chartered to develop the science and technology of IC interconnects. Through the years extensive processing equipment has been purchased and installed at the SUNY Albany site. This equipment will now be used to help develop the countries 3D integration infrastructure.
This first “kick off” Workshop was held on “Thermal and Design Issues in 3D” I’d say there were approx 75 attendees listening to key players in the field discuss the issues. I’ll mention some of the key point I picked up on below.
Mike Ignatowski of IBM gave a great talk on “System issues related to 3D technology”. The punch line was that 3D potential is huge, but adoption must be approached from a system-level perspective to get the full benefit.
- 3D Integration is an exercise in new system design not just a technology boost
- Adding 3D technology to a existing system design that was optimized for 2D results in only very modest benefits. We must rethink processor, memory and I/O designs
- Power efficiency is a critical issue - you can integrate more function than you can cost effectively cool
- Test and yield issues are a big concern - we must explore yield-tolerant design as a way to mitigate these problems
He is also worried aboutr test and yield issues. He sees two alternatives :
- Test each chip before stacking and again after packaging
- Package the entire stack and then test
- Does not double test cost, but
- Yield problems
Whatever the answers, we must solve these problems for 3D integration to take hold.
An interesting side light is the IBM study that has showed that historically no new technology produces a 2x-4x improvement when first introduced. As shown in the graph below, most new technologies no matter how much they are hyped (did I hear someone whisper NANO NANO) will only deliver 20-30% benefit over what they replace. Mike defied attendees to come up with a contrary example. If you have one let me know.
Posted by Philip Garrou on October 14, 2007 | Comments (1)
