Manufacturing of three dimensional integrated circuits

摘要

Along with scaling down in size, novel materials have been introduced into the semiconductor industry to enable continued improvements in performance and cost as predicted by Moore's law. It has become important now more than ever to include an environmental impact evaluation of future technologies, before they are introduced into manufacturing, in order to identify potentially environmentally harmful materials or processes and understand their implications, costs, and mitigation requirements. In this thesis, we introduce a methodology to compare alternative options on the environmental axis, along with the cost and performance axes, in order to create environmentally aware and benign technologies. This methodology also helps to identify potential performance and cost issues in novel technologies by taking a transparent and bottoms-up assessment approach. This methodology is applied to the evaluation of the MIT 3D IC technology in comparison to a standard CMOS 2D IC approach. Both options are compared on all three axes - performance, cost and environmental impact.