GLOBALFOUNDRIES today announced a significant milestone on the road to enabling 3D stacking of chips for next-generation mobile and consumer applications. At its Fab 8 campus in Saratoga County, NY, the company has begun installation of a special set of production tools to create Through-Silicon Vias (TSVs) in semiconductor wafers processed on the company's leading-edge 20nm technology platform. The TSV capabilities will allow customers to stack multiple chips on top of each other, providing another avenue for delivering the demanding requirements of tomorrow's electronic devices.

Essentially vertical holes etched in silicon and filled with copper, TSVs enable communication between vertically stacked integrated circuits. For example, the technology could allow circuit designers to place stacks of memory chips on top of an application processor, which can dramatically increase memory bandwidth and reduce power consumption-a key challenge for designers of the next generation of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., the world leader in advanced memory technology, today announced test results for servers utilizing the world's first 20 nanometer (nm) class Green Memory that were conducted at the Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) in Munich. A system based on Samsung's 20 nm-class DDR3 memory and solid state drives (SSDs) together with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V proved to be twice as fast as current memory configurations for servers setting up virtual machine instances and recovering data in private cloud environments. These advanced configurations also consumed as much as 50 percent less power per server.

Flash buddies Intel and Micron have today announced a significant breakthrough in terms of NAND density, the first 128 Gb (16 GB) MLC NAND memory chip. Manufactured on 20 nm process technology, this 128 Gb chip complies with the ONFI 3.0 specification (enabling speeds of up to 333 megatransfers per second) and can be used for new, high-capacity solid state drives, as well as for next-generation tablets, smartphones and other portable devices.

According to Intel and Micron, this milestone was made possible by the use of a new, innovative cell structure that 'breaks the scaling constraints of the standard NAND floating gate cell by integrating the first Hi-K/metal gate stack on NAND production.'