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Heterogeneous Integration ramps up electronics clout

Oct. 28, 2019

Heterogeneous Integration is the growing electronics practice of integrating separately manufactured components into a higher-level assembly (SiP), usually onto a single chip. A heterogeneously integrated device in the aggregate provides enhanced functionality and improved operating characteristics. The resulting improved robustness of electronics memory and processing may alleviate the world’s growing thirst for the new gold—data.
 

UCLA researchers push outer limits of electronics

UCLA researchers at the Center for Heterogeneous Integration and Performance Scaling (CHIPS) say that computers powered on old-school chips, festooned with microscopic transistors, are reaching their limits and a redesign is needed for growing market needs. Their work aims to make the innards of electronics fundamentally different, and will, in turn, allow new generations of flexible, implantable, faster, cheaper, smaller and more powerful systems, they say.

“It will make possible things that weren’t possible before,” said Subramanian Iyer, a UCLA professor of electrical and computer engineering, and director of CHIPS.

Every two years since 1965, the number of transistors on a computer chip has roughly doubled, as transistors have gotten exponentially smaller. This doubling—dubbed Moore’s Law— has hatched faster, smaller, cheaper, and more powerful computers. But as transistors reach the tiniest atomic sizes, this doubling is due to stall.

“We can’t keep making transistors smaller in an economical way,” said Iyer, who, before joining the UCLA faculty, worked for 30 years at IBM, where he helped design, develop, and manufacture new semiconductor technologies. “We have to look at other ways of scaling the technology.”

 “The energy it takes to communicate between chips has not changed; if anything, it has gone up,” Iyer said. It’s a bit like having old, outdated roads trying to support a growing, bustling city, he said.

At CHIPS, Iyer and his colleagues are replacing old-school circuit boards with silicon wafers. The researchers can align individual integrated circuits of transistors, called dies, onto each silicon wafer, allowing all those dies to act as if they were one giant chip the size of the wafer, which is approximately the size of a large dinner plate. In contrast, the largest chips made today are about 100 times smaller, or about 700 square millimeters.

Today’s single large chips, called SoCs for system-on-a-chip, use dies that must be manufactured at the same time in the same process, thus usually compromising either memory or processors in the process.

The platforms being developed at UCLA can use dies from a variety of sources that can be mixed and matched.1

Taiwan tech leader eyes biomedical electronics

In an article on DIGITIMES.com, Etron Technology Chairman Nicky Lu  extolled the value of heterogeneous integration in biomedical electronics applications.2 Lu said that some research firms are predicting the semiconductor industry’s production value to mushroom to $1 trillion by 2030, and he exhorted Taiwan’s IT industry to form partnerships with biomedical leaders to advance its global competitive edge. At present time, Taiwan’s semiconductor industry is ranked in the Top 3 of the world. Some recent research of combined IT technologies with medical applications include: Using a CMOS image sensor to trigger visual signals in the brain; employing an electrode on the cochlear bone to try to allow the deaf to hear; and implanting chips into patients to warn of impending epileptic attacks.

REFERENCES

1. DIGITIMES, “Biomedical electronics promising, says Etron chairman,” September 2019.

https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20190918PD204.html?chid=9

2. UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, “Making More of Moore’s Law,” September 2019. https://samueli.ucla.edu/making-more-of-moores-law/

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