Last week’s Electronic Design Process Symposium (EDPS) opened a rich new vein of 3D IC material and you’ll see a lot nuggets from me on that topic in the next few days. Meanwhile, Richard Goering has already published a post on his Industry Insights blog with a great overview of Riko Radojcic’s 3D presentation. Radojcic is the Director of Engineering at Qualcomm and has more than a passing interest in 3D IC assembly. Here are some of the high points:
- 3D ICs are almost mainstream already. Many types of 2.5D and 3D assemblies are already being designed and 3D memory stacks are already in production.
- Qualcomm is investigating stacks of memory and logic die, driven by the increasing costs associated with riding a 2D-only version of Moore’s Law.
- Wide I/O DRAM provides much better power efficiency, scalable to higher memory transfer rates and bandwidths, than does LPDDR3 DRAM.
- Stacking a pair of semiconductor die gives you about the same performance improvement as jumping to the next process technology generation.
Then Radojcic went on to detail the types of EDA tools he wants to support 3D IC design.
You really need to read Richard’s blog post for the details.
