Engineers from Stanford University, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have partnered with SkyWater Technology, the largest U.S.-based pure-play semiconductor foundry, to create a new type of multilayer computer chip. The design points toward major advances in artificial intelligence hardware and strengthens efforts to expand domestic semiconductor manufacturing.
Unlike conventional 2D chips that spread components across a single flat surface, the new prototype stacks extremely thin layers of circuitry on top of one another. Vertical connections link these layers, allowing data to move quickly between memory and computing elements.
This dense network of vertical wiring, combined with tightly integrated memory and processing units, helps overcome long-standing limits that have slowed progress in flat chip designs. Tests and simulations show that the 3D chip delivers performance improvements of roughly an order of magnitude compared with traditional 2D chips.
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