TAIPEI – Etron Technoogy Inc. has started work on buffered DRAM designs geared for 3-D ICs using through-hole vias. The company is also working on an upgrade of a low-cost gesture recognition module.
Chip stacking technology has the potential to disrupt business models and traditional systems design, said Nicky Lu, the company’s founder and chief executive.
Both more and less dense memory parts will be needed to support a variety of different kinds of 3-D chip stacks for different applications, said Lu known for his work driving Taiwan’s submicron program. “Most leading companies now claim TSVs will start in 2014, but I think 2015 is the first year of their real impact,” said Lu.
In the short term, the stacks will disrupt traditional thinking about the memory hierarchy in systems design. Long term, the stacks will include not only logic and memory die but optical, power. MEMS and bio components as well, he said.
3-D will open the door to putting packaging as a first step in component design. It will give chip designers deeper responsibilities in system design and systems designers an opportunity to define silicon, sometimes sparking collaborations between competitors, Lu said.
“I think Taiwan should do virtual vertical integration, making a cluster of companies that are separate but effectively collaborating to develop products,” Lu said. The groups should be “characterized by starting development together from day 1, sharing R&D and profit and loss,” he said.
“Whether this model could compete with Samsung or other vertical models is an open question,” he said.
3-D ICs could help raise the profile of memory chips. That could be particularly good news for Taiwan’s memory chip makers who have struggled to survive.
“Today DRAM companies are shorted because people don’t see their value, but in the future with 3-DICs I think this will change,” Lu said.
Meanwhile Etron also is working on an upgrade of a previously announced gesture recognition module. The new module will use the USB 3.0 bus to improve the speed and resolution of the product. The existing product uses USB 2.0, CMOS sensors and an image processor.
Etron will demo its gesture recognition module at Computex this week. “We have our own secret sauce to synchronize and process camera information using low cost CMOS sensors,” said Lu.
3-D ICs will revive DRAMs and drive design collaborations, said Nicky Lu.