Intel unveils glass substrates for chips to advance Moore’s Law
18.09.2023 - 14:05
/ venturebeat.com
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Intel said it has made a significant breakthrough in the development of glass substrates for next-generation advanced packaging in an attempt to stay on the past of Moore’s Law.
The big chip maker said this milestone achievement is set to redefine the boundaries of transistor scaling, enabling the realization of data-centric applications and propelling the advancement of Moore’s Law, which predicts that the number of transistors on a chip will double every couple of years. Intel said it should be able to make the jump to glass substrates by the end of the decade. The company made the announcement ahead of its Intel Innovation 2023 conference in San Jose, California this week.
Chip technology has advanced far over the past six decades thanks to this doubling effect. In 1971, Intel’s first microprocessor had 2,300 transistors. Now the company’s flagship chips have more than 100 billion transistors. But much of that doubling came from miniaturizing the width between chip circuits. That kind of advance has slowed down, as chips layers are now on the atomic level.
So Intel has been on the hunt for other ways to keep chip technology on the Moore’s Law treadmill. And it has found, oddly enough, a way forward by creating bigger and bigger chip packages, rather than smaller and smaller ones.
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Glass enables Intel to create a 50% larger chip area within a package so that Intel can fit more chips into a single electrical package.
By the end of the decade, Intel foresees 30 trillion transistors will be packaged on a glass substrate with other innovations such as 3D stacking of chips, said Rahul Manepalli, an Intel Fellow and director of substrate module engineering, in a press briefing.
“We’re taking the wraps off our glass core substrate technology, where we see glass core substrate brings continued feature scaling,” he said. “It allows us to do things that an organic package cannot do. It allows us to improve the power delivery to these power hungry, AI-centric, data-centric chips. It enables us to do high speed I/O signaling that’s not possible in organic packages, especially as you get to these switches with very high frequency at very low loss needs.”
Manepalli said it enables high manufacturing yields and low costs. The glass substrates will