Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Monday May 14 2018, @10:25PM   Printer-friendly
from the hot-tech dept.

The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has revealed a manufacturing technique (called wafer-on-wafer or WoW) that could allow CPUs and GPUs to take their first step towards vertical scaling:

Instead of one wafer per chip, future GPUs may include two or more wafers stacked vertically, which would double the performance without the need to develop new horizontal designs every 2 years. A dual wafer setup, for example, would be achieved by flipping the upper wafer over the lower one, binding both via a flip-chip package. Thus, future GPUs could include multiple wafers in one die and the operating system could detect it as a multi-processor graphics card, eliminating the need for SLI setups.

One shortcoming for this technology would be its lower manufacturing yields for sizes lower than 16 nm. If one of the stacked wafers does not pass the QA, the entire stack is discarded, leading to low yields and poor cost effectiveness. TSMC is currently working to improve this technology so that sub-12 nm processes could equally benefit from it.

Not discussed is how to deal with the heat generated in such a stack.

See also: Here's why Intel and AMD's 7nm CPU revolution is so important to the future of PCs


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by driverless on Tuesday May 15 2018, @01:30AM (1 child)

    by driverless (4770) on Tuesday May 15 2018, @01:30AM (#679880)

    My immediate response as well, the title should be:

    Dual-Wafer Packaging (Wafer-on-Wafer) Could Double CPU/GPU Heat Output

    Stacking only works when you've got parts with relatively low heat output, e.g. a flash, older CPU, RAM stack. A CPU, CPU stack is just an expensive oven element.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
       Insightful=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   3  
  • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday May 16 2018, @05:27AM

    by TheRaven (270) on Wednesday May 16 2018, @05:27AM (#680292) Journal
    I'd add to that: Moore's law is still more or less working, but Dennard Scaling has not for about 10 years. We can currently (cheaply) put more transistors on a chip than we can power / cool at the same time and that's been true for a while. Anything that increases density without improving cooling or decreasing power consumption is likely to be a waste of time. This might be useful for RAM, which tends to be manufactured using different processes and so is difficult to put on the same wafer, but CPUs and GPUs can easily be put on the same chip if you don't care about heat / power.
    --
    sudo mod me up