Evaluation Engineering - 32

HETEROGENEOUS
INTEGRATION
RAMPS UP
ELECTRONICS
CLOUT
By Ken Cormier, Managing Editor
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
UCL A 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

EVALUATION ENGINEERING NOVEMBER 2019

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like having old, outdated roads trying to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-moreof-moores-law/

ID 1554759 © Peter Rust | Dreamstime.com

TECHNOLOGY INSIGHTS

http://www.Dreamstime.com http://www.DIGITIMES.com https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20190918PD204.html?chid=9 https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20190918PD204.html?chid=9 https://samueli.ucla.edu/making-more-of-moores-law/ https://samueli.ucla.edu/making-more-of-moores-law/

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