By Zvi Or-Bach, President and CEO of MonolithIC 3D Inc.
On Sept 13, DARPA come out with Electronic Resurgence Initiative (ERI) programs. Quoting: “with an eye toward the times we now live in, [Gordon Moore] laid out the technical directions to explore when the conditions under which scaling will be the primary means for advancement are no longer met. A trio of simultaneously-released ERI BAAs—this one among them—parallel the research areas detailed on page three of Moore’s paper: materials and integration, architecture, and design. These new page-three-inspired investments, along with a series of related investments from the past year, comprise the overall Electronics Resurgence Initiative.”
Among these programs is the “Three Dimensional Monolithic System-on-a-Chip (3DSoC): Develop 3D monolithic technology that will enable > 50X improvement in SoC digital performance at power.”
In perfect timing, this year’s IEEE S3S 2017 at the Hyatt Regency at the San Francisco Airport will feature a comprehensive show case for monolithic 3D IC technologies.
At the start Al Fazio, Intel Senior Fellow, will give a plenary talk on how 3D NAND and 3D XPoint™ happened to be the trailblazing monolithic 3D IC technologies that have matured to volume production, taking over the fast growing memory market. The first day will end with two 3D IC focus sessions comprised of a mix of invited and submitted papers covering exotic technologies and the use of the emerging nano-wire transistor for 3D scaling.
The first half of the second day includes a collaborative event organized by Qualcomm and CEA Leti – the COOLCUBE/3DVLSI Open Workshop. The second half will include an open 3D tutorial providing full coverage of the various 3D integration technologies from TSV to Sequential Integrations.
The third day of the conference will include a full day with four sessions of invited and submitted talks on monolithic and other forms of 3D integration. These sessions will include a talk by us, MonolithIC 3D Inc., in which we will present a monolithic 3D technology that is ready to be rapidly deployed using the current transistor process. In that talk we will also describe how such an integration technology could be used to improve performance, reduce power and cost of most computer systems, suggestive of a 1,000x total system benefit.
In addition, the IEEE S3S conference will have full coverage of SOI and low power technologies, making it the place to be and to learn about alternative technologies to dimensional scaling. I am looking forward to seeing you at the S3S from October 16th thru 19th, 2017.