IBM continues to improve its circuit manufacturing and after announcing its new cache memory technology based on DRAM the time has come for the next step. IBM now claims to have moved Moore’s law into the third dimension. It”s simply a way for them to announce its latest manufacturing process. Technology is called ‘trough-silicon vias’ and it makes it possible to pack circuit components much more efficiently and foremost closer together than before. This is possible by not spreading the circuit components as much as before but by stacking them instead, simply adding a third dimension.
“The new IBM method eliminates the need for long-metal wires that connect today’s 2-D chips together, instead relying on through-silicon vias, which are essentially vertical connections etched through the silicon wafer and filled with metal. These vias allow multiple chips to be stacked together, allowing greater amounts of information to be passed between the chips.”
IBM already has great plans for its new manufacturing technology and its Power processors and Blue Gene supercomputer are two of the products that will take advantage of the new technology. The first test circuits manufactured using the through-silicon vias technology will appear during the second half of 2007 and the production samples will arrive in 2008.
