A collaboration between top US universities and a domestic foundry has achieved a significant milestone: the creation of the first commercially manufactured monolithic 3D integrated circuit prototype in the United States. Early tests indicate this novel design delivers a performance improvement of approximately four times compared to conventional 2D chips, offering a new path to overcome physical scaling limits.
The key breakthrough is the fabrication of a true 3D structure within a single, continuous manufacturing process at a commercial foundry. Instead of stacking pre-made chips, the team used low-temperature processing (415°C thermal budget) to sequentially build multiple device layers—including silicon CMOS logic, resistive RAM, and carbon nanotube transistors—on a single wafer. This creates a high-density vertical interconnect network that drastically shortens data travel distances between memory and compute units, directly addressing the "memory wall" problem. The chip was produced using SkyWater Technology's mature 90-130nm process on a 200mm production line, proving its commercial viability.
Simulations suggest that with additional stacked layers, this architecture could achieve up to a 12x performance gain for AI workloads. In the long term, such 3D integration has the potential to improve the energy-delay product by 100 to 1000 times. This achievement demonstrates that next-generation monolithic 3D technology can be integrated into existing commercial semiconductor manufacturing flows.
ICgoodFind's Insight
The successful fabrication of this monolithic 3D chip prototype in a commercial fab marks a pivotal step. It validates a viable manufacturing path beyond 2D scaling, potentially unlocking massive gains in performance and efficiency for future computing, especially in AI.
