At the ISSCC 2024 held on February 18-22, TSMC brought another new technology. The full name of ISSCC is International Solid State Circuits Conference, which is recognized by the academic and industrial communities as the highest level conference in the field of integrated circuit design worldwide. It is also regarded as the "Chip Olympiad" in the field of integrated circuit design.
At this year's conference, TSMC introduced a new generation of packaging technology for high-performance computing and AI chips to the outside world. On the basis of existing 3D packaging, it also integrated silicon photon technology to improve interconnection effects and reduce power consumption.
According to Zhang Xiaoqiang, Senior Vice President of Business Development at TSMC, this technology aims to help package more HBM and Chiplet small chips, thereby improving the performance of AI chips.
At present, if we want to add more HBM and Chiplet small chips, we must add more components and IC carrier boards, which may lead to connection and energy consumption issues - hence the need for silicon photon technology.
TSMC's packaging technology uses silicon photon technology to replace traditional I/O circuits with optical fibers for data transmission. Moreover, in this packaging architecture, heterogeneous chips are stacked on top of the base chip and hybrid bonding technology is used to maximize I/O performance.
In addition, Zhang Xiaoqiang stated that the most advanced chips today can accommodate up to 100 billion transistors, but with advanced 3D packaging technology, it can be extended to a single chip containing 1 trillion transistors.
TSMC did not disclose the specific commercialization time of the new generation packaging technology.
However, it is worth noting that since last year, TSMC has frequently reported trends in laying out silicon photonics and CPOs.
In September 2023, it was reported that TSMC was collaborating with major clients such as Broadcom and NVIDIA to develop new products such as silicon optical and CPO optical components. The earliest major orders will begin in the second half of 2024, and it is expected to enter the stage of high-volume production in 2025.
At that time, industry insiders revealed that TSMC was expected to introduce silicon optical technology into computing processes such as CPUs and GPUs in the future. The internal electronic transmission lines would be changed to optical transmission, and the computing power would be dozens of times higher than that of existing processors.
The Vice President of TSMC has previously publicly stated that if a good "silicon optical integration system" can be provided, it can solve the two key issues of energy consumption and AI computing power. "This will be a new paradigm shift. We may be at the beginning of a new era."
Industry analysis shows that high-speed data transmission still uses pluggable optical components. With the rapid progress of transmission speed and the entry of the 800G era, higher transmission rates such as 1.6T to 3.2T will be expected in the future, resulting in power loss and heat dissipation management issues
