Main Street, East Fishkill fab, New York. Courtesy:semiconductor-technology.comIBM presented the details of its TSV manufacturing breakthrough among the topics being presented at theIED meeting in Washington, DC. HMC parts will be manufactured at IBM's advanced semiconductor fab in East Fishkill, New York, using the company's 32nm, high-K metal gate process technology. 

HMC technology uses advanced TSVs — vertical conduits that electrically connect a stack of individual chips — to combine high-performance logic with Micron's state-of-the-art DRAM. HMC delivers bandwidth and efficiencies a leap beyond current device capabilities.

HMC prototypes, for example, clock in with bandwidth of 128GB/s. By comparison, current state-of-the-art devices deliver 12.8GB/s. HMC also requires 70% less energy to transfer data and offers a small form factor — 10% of the conventional memory footprint.

HMC will enable a new generation of performance in applications ranging from large-scale networking and high-performance computing, to industrial automation and, eventually, consumer products.

"This is a milestone in the industry move to 3D semiconductor manufacturing," said Subu Iyer, IBM Fellow. "The manufacturing process we are rolling out will have applications beyond memory, enabling other industry segments as well. In the next few years, 3D chip technology will make its way into consumer products, and we can expect to see drastic improvements in battery life and functionality of devices."