50$ 3D bonding coming ??; Intel announces "...we are ready"

Burlingame CA was the site for the 4^th annual RTI
conference “3-D Architectures for Semiconductor Integration
and Packaging”. 225+ of the worlds experts gathered to
compare notes and hear the latest on 3D integration technology and
business projections.

Conference Director Matt Mecray and technical chairs Wilfried
Bair, Suss, and Sitaram Arkalgud, SEMATECH, put together an
excellent collection of speakers to cover a wide range of 3D
topics.

In the pre-conference symposium I spent 2 hours covering 3D
definitions and technology options, Bob Patti, CEO of Tezzaron
Semiconductor, reviewed 3D requirements and tradeoffs and Lisa
McIllrath, President of R3Logic spent the remainder of the session
instructing on how to design 3D circuits. Some interesting figures
from Bob Patti – (1) most Tezzaron memory designs use ~ 10K
vertical interconnects (TSV) / mm sq.; (2) Bob expects wafer
bonding to cost ~ 50$ per wafer pair by 2010. Bob claims Tezzaron
is getting 1 micron alignment accuracy (3 sigma) on 8 inch wafers
today. Recall Tezzaron earlier in the year announced a production
agreement with Chartered Semi in Singapore.

The biggest announcement of the conference was from Jerry
Bautista of Intel. His talk concerned the well published memory
latency issue when building multicore processors. He informed the
audience that stacking the DRAM under the CPU does heat up the DRAM
a little, but that this is not a major thermal issue. In this
configuration power must be routed through the memory to get to the
processor and Jerry indicated that ~ 1A / mm sq is needed to
operate the CPU.

Of more interest to the entire conference was Jerry’s
comment that there were no remaining technical issues and that
Intel was ready to commercialize their 3D integration technology as
soon as the product groups decided which product to insert the
technology into. He felt the most likely candidates would be
workstations and/or HPC’s.

…….more information from the RTI 3D conference is
coming up soon, so stay linked to “Perspectives from the
Leading Edge”