3D Circuitry

Jon Slaughter · 2009-10-09T06:07:23+00:00

Why are circuits not layed in 3D to produce fast amounts of gates? If you take your average memory circuit such as SRAM and "layer" it as high as it is wide then you'll get a huge increase.What is the difficulties in doing such things? I imagine heat dissipation would be a big problem but maybe one can add in "heat pipes" to carry the heat from the inner layers. If one has a matrix of 1000x1000 cells for a 1Mb memory then repeating that in the "z" dimension would give a 1Gb memory.(sure it would be square and bulky but thats not the point)Now maybe they already do this to some degree but I've never seen it mentioned. Maybe it's difficult to layer the substraits together?I was thinking that a true 3D method would be optimial for density reasons. If a potential solid substance could be created where one could apply a laser of difficult wave lengths to get different properties such as a conductor or semi-conductor then one might be able to make truely 3D circuits. Similar to 3D printing. The laser heats the material in such a way as to turn it into a conductor or semiconductor. It is built up in a continuous manner. Anyways... just an idea. Not saying it is practical but just the abstract idea would work.But I don't even see devices that use true "layering" techniques. I do realize that in some sense standard semiconductor fabrication uses "layering" but they only have one substrate layer? If one could layer, say, fpga cores then they would become vastly more powerful.Anyways, just something I was wondering about...

Oct 09, 2009 22 Replies

Rate this thread:

krw 16 years ago

It was only driven to church on Sunday by a little old lady, huh? ;-)

Vote

Michael A. Terrell 16 years ago

No, they replaced it after two years, because they couldn't expand its data handling without being off line for several weeks. Most of the other stuff we processed was at least ten years old, and full of IBM's famous sharp edged stamped steel that cut the crap out of you. The owner of the business had a constant cough, until we started hosing out the dust & mold before equipment was taken into the shop.

The movie \'Deliverance\' isn\'t a documentary!

Vote