Device, Circuit and System Dimensions of 3-D Integration

From a device point of view, transistor scaling, which has been proceeding at an impressive pace for decades, can't really keep it up any more. From a system point of view, design is increasingly limited by communication and power. Three-dimensional circuit integration (3-D Integration) is an exploratory approach aimed at providing higher circuit connectivity specifically through improvements in vertical connectivity and resulting in higher communication bandwith together with reduced digital system power. 3-D integration approaches, through mixing of process and materials technologies, potentially provide a path to faster computation, compactness in mobile applications, improvement in performance of systemson-chip, high frequency mixed-signal circuits, advanced imaging, ultra-fast signal processing, and other new applications. However, 3-D approaches must address two critical issues heat dissipation and manufacturing costs, and find the architectural approaches that account for constraints posed by the technology implementation.