The emergence of stacked 3D silicon and its impact on microelectronics systems integration

Stacked 3D silicon has been under development for a number of years at a substantial level of investment on the part of Government as well as public and private investors. Volume manufacturing of this technology is now in place and foundry services are provided to designers of Stacked 3D silicon components and products. Stacked 3D silicon has already had a major impact on microelectronics systems and products into which it has been integrated. Examples given include solid state data recorders, digital signal processors, massively parallel processors, artificial neural networks, imaging processing, and imaging sensors. Manufacturing and cost issues are identified and discussed along with present status and projections showing that, as volumes rise, no significant premium will be required to incorporate Stacked 3D Silicon into standard products. The performance advantages of Stacked 3D silicon are very large: the ultra-high scale density results in factors of hundreds to thousands in both speed and power when ICs are designed for 3D. The paper concludes with a picture of the coming next generation 3D stacked silicon: 10-1000 layers of ultra-thin, low power circuits with 1000s of inter-layer interconnect comprising entire systems in a single cube.