IBM’s chip-stacking technology shows promise

Posted by Dennis Sellers Apr 18, 2007 at 1:11am

IBM has found a way to connect chips inside products ranging from cell phones to supercomputers, an advance that promises to prolong battery life in wireless devices and eventually speed data transfers between the processor and memory chips in computers. The question is how this new technology will impact Intel (if IP laws allow it) and thus the Mac and other Apple products.

Macsimum Contributing Editor J. Scott Anderson has wondered why this approach hasn’t been tried before. Back when Cray was making their first super computers, reducing the distance between components was  a huge piece. That is one of the primary reasons the old Cray systems were physically designed the way they were.

“The idea is simple, even though the speed of the electrical connection is almost incomprehensible to humans, it is still measurable,” he says. “Thus we know that if we cut the distance in half between components, it literally takes half a long for a signal to get from one chip to another. Because of realities in using that data, this does not translate into a direct doubling of the speed of the computer, but it does have a significant impact.”

The manufacturing technique outlined by IBM eliminates the long metal wires that are currently used to transfer information and electrical charge between chips. In IBM’s solution, two chips are sandwiched on top of each other—the distance between them measured in microns, or millionths of a meter—and held together by vertical connections that are etched in silicon holes filled with metal. The company said it could have memory-on-processor technology by 2009 for use in servers, supercomputers and other machines.

Will we see it in Apple products? If so, when?

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