Chartered, Tezzaron team for high-speed 3D memory chips

By Colleen Taylor, Contributing Editor -- Electronic News, 6/13/2007

Foundry player Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing announced Tuesday that it is beginning to ramp production of ultra high-speed memory chips for memory architecture prototype developer Tezzaron Semiconductor.

Chartered is manufacturing Tezzaron's 3T-iRAM family of two-dimensional 72-Mbit memory devices. According to the companies, these parts use proprietary technology that mimics SRAM memory (SRAM), but provides greater speed and higher reliability while drawing less power. The companies said that the devices, which will be built on Chartered's 0.13-micron process, will be packaged with industry-standard interfaces so that equipment suppliers can swap them into their current products with no design changes.

In addition, the two companies said they are working on the manufacture of Tezzaron's 3D devices, and hope to see them become the first 3D ICs to be manufactured in volume.  

"Chartered has shown a willingness to work with us and push the envelope on some new approaches that we believe hold great potential for the entire IC industry," J.T. Ayers, CEO of Tezzaron, said in a statement. "We believe 3D technology can directly address the growing interconnect and real estate issue in today's complex chips, and it's assuring to have a partner like Chartered to demonstrate its commercial viability in volume production."

With Tezzaron's FaStack technology, device circuitry is divided into sections that are built onto separate wafers using standard processing. Chartered enables 3D stacking of these wafers by building hundreds of thousands of Tezzaron's embedded thru-silicon interconnections into the circuitry on each wafer. The wafers are then aligned with a precision of 0.5-micron, bonded, thinned, and diced into individual devices. According to the companies, a FaStack chip operates as a single device.

The first products manufactured at Chartered using this approach will be the 72-Mbit memory device, currently in production, which will be double stacked to create a 144-Mbit SRAM replacement product.

In other recent 3D news, on Tuesday Toshiba Corp. said it has developed a new 3D NAND memory cell array structure which relies on advances in the stacking process rather than on process technology. The company claims that the new structure could be the ticket to meeting a future demand for higher density NAND flash memory.