The next Electronic Generation starts with the 3D chips. 3D means Three Dimensional Integrated Circuits. This kind of chips are in which two are more layers of active electronic elctronic components.
To accomplish anything in the device, you need to get in your car or bike and drive to another address. Downtown, in a skyscraper, you just use an elevator.
Elevators are more efficient -- and the semiconductor industry has taken notice (metaphorically speaking) with a trend toward 3D chip design. Instead of putting dies in separate packages, soldered to a circuit board and sending data through their I/O ports to other chips (i.e., driving through the suburbs), dies are stacked and data is moved from one layer to the next (i.e., via the elevator).
Chip industry insiders, such as Brian Cronquist, vice president at Monolithic 3D Inc., a 3D chip technology startup in San Jose, say that a 3D design using two stacked dies with 22-nanometer geometry would produce much the same result -- including reduced wire length, gate size and consumption of power for devide -- as moving to one die with 15nm.The chip was manufactured with two dies using face-to-face stacking, which allowed a dense via structure. This a next electronic generation.
