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posted by Fnord666 on Friday August 16 2019, @11:59AM   Printer-friendly
from the a-what? dept.

TSMC Shows Colossal Interposer, Says Moore's Law Still Alive

In the company's first blog post, TSMC has stated that Moore's Law is still alive and well, despite the zeitgeist of recent times being the reverse. The company also showed a colossal 2500mm2 interposer that includes eight HBM memory chips and two big processors.

Godfrey Cheng, TSMC's new head of global marketing, wrote the blog post. He notes that Moore's Law is not about performance, but about transistor density. While performance traditionally improved by increasing the clock speed and architecture, today it is more often improved by increasing parallelization, and hence requires increases in chip size. This enhances the importance of transistor density because chip cost is directly proportional to its area.

[...] "one possible future of great density improvements is to allow the stacking of multiple layers of transistors in something we call Monolithic 3D Integrated Circuits. You could add a CPU on top of a GPU on top of an AI Edge engine with layers of memory in between. Moore's Law is not dead, there are many different paths to continue to increase density."

[...] [System-technology co-optimization (STCO)] is done through advanced packaging, for which TSMC supports silicon-based interposers and fan-out-based chiplet integration. It also has techniques to stack chips on wafers, or stack wafers on top of other wafers. As one such example, TSMC showed a nearly-2500mm2 silicon interposer – the world's largest – on top of which two 600mm2 processors are placed and eight 75mm2 HBM memory chips, which makes for 1800mm2 of compute and memory silicon on top of the interposer-based package, well over two times the conventional reticle size limit.

Related: Dual-Wafer Packaging (Wafer-on-Wafer) Could Double CPU/GPU Performance
Another Step Toward the End of Moore's Law
Intel's Jim Keller Promises That "Moore's Law" is Not Dead, Outlines 50x Improvement Plan


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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday August 18 2019, @12:43AM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Sunday August 18 2019, @12:43AM (#881617) Journal

    It's just one of a number of advancements that will be competing to leave the lab and enter the fab. Some of them will never be practical, but multiple could succeed.

    However, the concept of moving logic ever closer to memory is a done deal, and impossible to ignore.

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