March 27, 2012 -- 2.5D has marked advantages of capacity, performance, system space and overall system power consumption over traditional single-die implementations. 3D promises to have even more. 2.5D, as implemented by Xilinx in the Virtex-7 2000T device, places several die (what Xilinx calls "slices") side-by-side on a passive silicon interposer.
The vision of a 3D IC is truly promising, but some industry watchers believe the 2.5D market is perhaps being too easily dismissed as a stepping stone to true 3D design. 2.5D has the distinct advantage of being already here today for some companies, and leveraging it takes only minor adjustments to current design flows and seemingly the manufacturing chain.
By Mike Santarini. (Santarini is with Xilinx, Inc.)
This brief introduction has been excerpted from the original copyrighted article.
Keywords: FPGAs, field programmable gate arrays, FPGA design, 3D ICs, 3D chips, stacked ICs, packages, packaging, Xilinx, EE Times Programmable Logic Designline
