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Re: SE<<Building chips vertically has been steadily gaining steam over the past year. “Die stacking with conventional inter-chip interposers and bonds, and through-silicon via connections is becoming fully mainstream,” saysChris Rowen, fellow at Cadence. “It will enable both tight, cost-effective integration of disparate semiconductor technologies for memory, logic, MEMS and RF, lower energy for communications and new form-factors for products.”>> sabatino, thanks - there's a lot of futuristic predictions in the article you provided and Rambus appears to be working on some of it. With regard to the above, we can see that Rambus is working on that important change / trend: << << DETAILED DESCRIPTION [0016] The disclosed embodiments relate to methods and apparatus for a cache memory design. In embodiments described below, this new cache memory design may utilize packaging technologies, such as die stacking, and through-silicon vias (TSVs), which enable memory chips to be placed in extremely close proximity to processor chips. Moreover, these proximate memory chips effectively comprise a new level in a memory hierarchy which resides between the last level of on-chip cache memory and main memory, for example dynamic random-access memory (DRAM). [0017] For example, FIG. 1 illustrates a memory hierarchy in a computer system 100 in accordance with the disclosed embodiments. This memory hierarchy includes a processor chip 102, which contains one or more processor cores. (The term "processor chip" can refer to a semiconductor chip that contains one or more processor cores, associated caches and address-translation circuitry.) This processor chip 102 also includes one or more levels of physically addressed cache memory 104 (which possibly includes virtually indexed, physically tagged L1 caches). These on-chip cache memories 104 can include L1, L2 and L3 caches, which can be anywhere in size from as small as a few kilobytes to as large as tens and possibly hundreds of megabytes. These on-chip cache memories 104 store cache lines which have recently been accessed or are likely to be accessed in the near future.>> And here's Rambus working on interposers: << SUNNYVALE, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES – 04/15/2013 – Rambus Inc. (NASDAQ: RMBS), the innovative technology solutions company that brings invention to market, today announced it has received a “Best Paper Award” for one of the papers it presented at the 2013 DesignCon. The paper, titled, “3D Si Interposer Design and Electrical Performance Study”, was awarded in the DesignCon Chip-Level Design category.>> |
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