French research institute Leti has extended its collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies under which the partners were developing CoolCube, the former’s sequential integration technology.
Created by Leti as a way of creating high density, high performance circuits, CoolCube is said to eliminate the need for through silicon vias – TSVs – to allow stacking of layers of active transistors.
“The Qualcomm and Leti teams have demonstrated the potential of this technology for designing and fabricating high density and high performance chips for mobile devices,” said Karim Arabi, Qualcomm Technologies’ vice president of engineering. “We are optimistic that this technology could address some of the technology scaling issues and this is why we are extending our collaboration with Leti.”
By introducing a stacking process that supports low temperature transistor processing, CoolCube technology avoids degrading the performance of transistors lower in the stack or the metal interconnects between the layers of the transistors.
As part of the renewed collaboration, the partners are looking to build a complete CoolCube ecosystem that takes the technology from design to fabrication.
Leti’s CEO Marie Semeria added: “Together, we aim to build a complete ecosystem, with foundries, equipment suppliers and EDA and design houses, to assemble all the pieces of the puzzle and move the technology into the product qualification phase.”
Author
Graham Pitcher
Source: www.newelectronics.co.uk