San Jose, Calif. – IBM has found a way to connect chips inside products ranging from cellphones to supercomputers, an advance that promises to prolong battery life in wireless devices and eventually speed data transfers between the processor and memory chips in computers, the company said today.
The manufacturing technique outlined by IBM Corp. eliminates the long metal wires that are currently used to transfer information and electrical charge between chips.
The memory and processor chips are often spaced inches apart, causing a lag in transmission as chipmakers multiply the number and voracity of calculating cores on their processors.
Slowdowns crop up when data-hungry processors cannot retrieve information fast enough from memory to perform their increasingly complex functions.
In IBM’s solution, two chips are sandwiched on top of one another – the distance between them measured in microns, or millionths of a meter – and held together by vertical connections that are etched in silicon holes that are filled with metal.
