San Francisco, CA. At a Leti Day event held July 14 in conjunction with SEMICON West, Marie Semeria, CEO of CEA-Leti, described Leti’s 3D integration for tomorrow’s devices. She commented on how her organization can help partners build wearable connected sensors and devices for home automation. Leti, she said, is active in such fields as IoT and smart objects, energy and environment, manufacturing, transport, and biology and health.
Other topics covered during the event included 3D nanocharacterization, 3D lighting for cost-effectiveness, 3D photonics integration, 3D technology for high-performance computing, and CoolCube 3D sequential integration technology.
With regard to CoolCube, the organization announced its first results the demonstrating of CoolCube’s feasibility in FinFET technology on Leti’s 300-mm production line. CoolCube, under development for eight years, aims at fully benefiting from the third dimension, and is enabled by cutting in half the thermal budget in manufacturing transistors, while maintaining their performance.
At the Leti Day event, Olivier Faynot, microelectronic division manager, said CoolCube enables the continuation of Moore’s Law through high-mobility material co-integration, opening a path for heterogeneous integration. CoolCube circuit designs improve the tradeoff between area, speed, and power.
Mobile devices, where minimal power consumption is key, are the primary market for chips manufactured with the technology, Semeria said. CoolCube also allows designers to include backside imagers in the chips, and co-integration of NEMS in a CMOS fabrication process also is possible.
“CoolCube enables local via density that is 10,000 times higher than ‘standard’ 3D integration, because the technology is designed to connect stacked active layers at a nanometric scale,” said Maud Vinet, Leti’s advanced CMOS laboratory manager, in a press release. “In the digital area, we expect this 3D technique to allow a gain of 50% in area and 30% in speed compared to the same technology generation in classic 2D—gains comparable to those expected in the next generation. In heterogeneous integration, we expect CoolCube to be an actual enabler of smart-sensor arrays by allowing a close integration of sensors, detection electronics and digital signal processing.”
