Future Interconnect Materials and System Integration Strategies for Data-Intensive Applications

The microelectronics industry today faces multiple inflections: increasing technology complexity, emerging data-intensive market drivers like the Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), and an increasing focus on system-level integration & optimization. These inflections challenge the industry to build innovative collaboration models that cut across traditional silos. SEMI has built a collaborative platform specifically to address this challenge by providing early and comprehensive assessment of future technologies (5-8 years out). The first project focused on interconnect materials and integration strategies, which are critical to most computing systems. Specific elements studied here include the increase in resistivity with narrowing wire-widths, supply-chain issues with proposed solutions, and the impact on latency for simple circuit systems. In addition, we also compared a two-dimensional (2D) system with an interposer-based system (2.5D) to quantify the impact of the latter on the energy-delay product for various applications.