Halloween
In the US we are
approaching Oct 31, the day for pumpkins and witches. Hannah and Madeline wish
all IFTLE readers a Happy Halloween.
IARPA Trusted Integrated Chips
At the IEEE 3DIC in San
Francisco Dan Radack of IDA [Institute of Defense Analysis] recently gave an
update on the IARPA trusted Integrated
Chip Program known as TIC
Background
From 19996 – 2006 the
IC Fab at Ft Meade was used to fabricate ICs required for Govt. programs. It
was mothballed 5-6 years ago. From 2003 to present the Govt. has used so called
“trusted foundries” but they found that they were not able to provide
everything that the Govt. needed.
With all of the top
foundries now situated outside the US or owned by non US entities, there was a
need for a new way of insuring secure state of the art chip procurement. This
certainly dovetailed with the interest in cyber security i.e. how to prevent
counterfeits and the vision of needing more-than-Moore technology (i.e. sensors
in a 3D chip stack) in the future.
Trusted Integrated Chips program TIC
In the summer of 2011 The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity
(IARPA) announced its Trusted Integrated
Chips program. TIC features what IARPA calls "split-manufacturing,"
where fabrication of new chips is divided into Front-End-of-Line (FEOL)
manufacturing consisting of transistor layers to be fabricated by offshore state-of-the-art”
foundries lines and Back-End-of-Line (BEOL) development that would be
fabricated by trusted U.S. facilities.
• obtain the highest performance possible in integrated circuits
• obtain near 100% assurance that designs are safe and secure -- not
compromised with malicious circuitry
• ensure security of designs, capability, and performance while
simultaneously protecting intellectual property
• realize secure systems combining advanced CMOS with other high value
chips.
6 organizations did design of CMOS circuits in the MPW multi
project wafer . Global foundries performed the front end work and IBM Burlington fabricated the interconnect
layers . Each of the 6 designers then capped the structure with their
heterogeneous layer .
NGAS, Cornell, Lucent, Raytheon Vision systems , CMU,
Stanford
Raytheon capped
with focal plane array for vision system
Carnegie Mellon –
cap with piezoelectric MEMS containing digital, analog and smart SRAM
Bell Labs / Lucent
– cap in photonics layer
Northrup Grumman –
InP mm wave circuits
Cornell – FPGA
with ultrasonic comm. Cap
Stanford - cap
with materials and ReRam (resistive RAM)
The program is now moving to 65 nm. The move to 28nm will be
June or 2014
The Apple
A7 is a PoP 64-bit SoC designed by Apple. It first appeared in the iPhone 5S, which was introduced in September 2013. Apple states that
it is up to twice as fast and has up to twice the graphics power compared to
its predecessor, the Apple A6. The A7 is a 64-bit 1.3GHz dual-core CPU coupled with
what’s believed to be a Power VR G6430 GPU. The A7 is manufactured by Samsung
on a high-κ metal gate (HKMG) 28 nm process and the chip includes over 1
billion transistors on a die 102 mm2 in size.
Fellow blogger Dick
James from Chipworks has sent the first shots of the PoP processor. He
comments that “”It looks as though there
s some degree of bowing in the top package, and there is an interface layer
between the two packages. ….Another surprise is silver wire in the Elpida DRAM
package..the pitch of the TMV (through mold via) between the top and bottom
packages is 0.35mm. Ball pitch on the base is 0.4mm. There are 3 rows of TMVs
for a total of 456. Ball count on the base is 34 x 38 = 1292”
Cross section of the A7 is shown below.
For all the latest on 3DIC and advanced packaging stay
linked to IFTLE……………………………………….
No comments:
Post a Comment