In 1884 (no, that's not a typographical error), Edwin Abbott wrote a satire about Victorian England and its social hierarchy, in the guise of a mathematical story about life in a two-dimensional world, whence the whimsical title, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. If one can look beyond Abbott's misogyny to the crux of the mathematical story, it is an illuminating introduction to geometry in one, two and three dimensions, with some generalizing hints about higher dimensional geometries. (You can read a copy at the Internet Archive, or purchase a hardcopy). 
The story is told from the perspective of a square, a resident of Flatland, who receives a visit from an inhabitant of a three-dimensional world – Spaceland. In Flatland, of course, the sphere is perceived only as a circle whose diameter varies based on the sphere's orientation to the plane. The sphere preaches the existence of higher dimensions, but the Flatlander leaders attempt to suppress all such information.
Denizens of Waferland
In fine recursive fashion, the Flatland story is itself a metaphor for our tenacious embrace of our two-dimensional world of semiconductors, particularly as it relates to memory technologies. We are deeply entangled in the angst, ennui, despair and perhaps even the clinical depression related to our encounter with the limits of instruction level parallelism (ILP), sequential execution semantics and the microprocessor power wall.
As a community, we have grudgingly and guardedly recognized the need for multicore processors (See Three Views on Multicore and Manycore: Able Was I Ere I Saw Elba.) However, we are still clinging tenaciously to our dual in-line memory module (DIMM), two-dimensional packaging and double data rate (DDR) memory designs. We need a visitor from the third dimension, preaching the gospel of chip stacking to the denizens of chip waferland.
Chip Stacking: Beyond DDR
We are approaching scaling limits for our pin-based interfaces. Each generation, we have dropped voltages, increased clock rates and doubled the number of words transferred. DDR memory first operated at 2.5V and up to 400 Mb/s, dropped to 1.8V and increased to 800 Mb/s for DDR2, and is at 1.5V and 1600 Mb/s for DDR3. We can see DDR4 on the horizon, perhaps in 2012 at ~1V.
It is time – long past time – for us to move to the third dimension and stack our chips. With chip (die) stacking, need not be constrained by connections to the perimeters of our chips, but can exploit connectivity across a larger fraction of their area. IBM, Intel, Samsung and others are exploring variations of this idea, as this smattering of press releases and articles illustrates.
With lower power, multicore designs, through silicon vias (TSVs), and wafer thinning for heat dissipation, we can crack the memory wall that has plagued us for so long. More to the point, those of us in the big iron/fast iron camp could learn a few things from our compatriots in the embedded systems world, where innovative packaging is a fundamental market driver.
Make no mistake; this will not be easy, as it requires new approaches to via fabrication, as well changing our ecosystem of chipsets and interface standardization processes. We may not have tachyon-based hyperspatial communication, but surely we can escape from Flatland.
Is it the author's misogyny, or the misogyny of the Victorian era being described and satirized by the author?
Posted by: Greg Lindahl | April 19, 2009 at 06:20 PM