Intel says that it has become the first in the industry to implement backside power delivery on a product-like test chip, achieving the performance needed to propel the world into the next era of computing.
PowerVia, which will be introduced on the Intel 20A process node in the first half of 2024, is Intel’s industry-leading backside power delivery solution. It reportedly solves the growing issue of interconnect bottlenecks in area scaling by moving power routing to the backside of a wafer.
“PowerVia is a major milestone in our aggressive ‘five nodes in four years’ strategy and on our path to achieving a trillion transistors in a package in 2030. Using a trial process node and subsequent test chip enabled us to de-risk backside power for our leading process nodes, placing Intel a node ahead of competitors in bringing backside power delivery to market,” said Ben Sell, Intel vice president of technology development.
Intel decoupled development of PowerVia from transistor development to ensure its readiness for silicon implementation based on Intel 20A and Intel 18A process nodes. PowerVia was tested on its own internal test node to debug and ensure good functionality of the technology before its integration with RibbonFET in Intel 20A. After fabrication and testing on a silicon test chip, PowerVia was confirmed to bring a remarkably efficient use of chip resources with greater than 90 per cent cell utilisation and major transistor scaling, enabling chip designers to achieve performance and efficiency gains in their products.
Intel will present these findings in two papers at the VLSI Symposium on June 11-16 in Kyoto, Japan.
The company says that it has a long track record of introducing the industry’s most critical new technologies, such as strained silicon, Hi-K metal gate and FinFET, to propel Moore’s Law forward.
PowerVia is reportedly the first to solve the growing interconnect bottleneck issue for chip designers. Surging use cases, including artificial intelligence and graphics, require smaller, denser and more powerful transistors to meet ever-growing computing demands. Today and for the past many decades, power and signal lines within a transistor’s architecture have competed for the same resources. By separating the two, chips can increase performance and energy-efficiency, and deliver better results for customers. Backside power delivery is vital to transistor scaling, enabling chip designers to increase transistor density without sacrificing resources to deliver more power and performance than ever.
