IBM and 3M Team Up to Make a Semiconductor Adhesive That Will Enable Next-Gen Chips
IBM and 3M are Making a Semiconductor Adhesive IBM IBM and 3M are collaborating on a new kind of semiconductor glue that will bind together future generations of 3-D semiconductor chips. The idea is to create a whole new kind of adhesive that hold things tightly together while also conducting heat and insulating at the same time. In other words, it doesn't sound easy. But a material like this is necessary if companies like IBM are going to move beyond stacking a few layers of silicon and get down to the business of stacking 100-chip towers that will power the devices of the future. 3-D semiconductors are basically multi-layered chips that can stack computing power, networking, and memory all into one neat system-on-a-chip. Right now companies like IBM can stack a handful of chips, but what they want are silicon towers. That means they need some kind of mortar that possesses...