Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Thanks to CTOnews.com netizen OC_Formula for the clue delivery! CTOnews.com, November 12, at this year's Open Computing Project (OCP) global summit, Samsung's advanced packaging team demonstrated the bottlenecks and solutions that may be encountered in the further development of HBM.

Samsung said that using silicon photon technology to interconnect HBM memory and logic parts can achieve faster rates and better energy efficiency.

Photonics is based on a technique that encodes individual photon (particle / wave) information, which not only greatly reduces power consumption (emits light particles instead of electrons), but also greatly increases processing speed (CTOnews.com Note: delay reaches femtosecond, or trillionth of a second, near the speed limit of light).

Samsung proposed two possible interconnection architectures, one is similar to the existing structure, but uses photonic intermediary layer to achieve interconnection; the other directly separates the logic part from the HBM and connects the two parts with silicon photonic communication.

To put it simply, the first is to add a photonic intermediary layer between the basic encapsulation layer and the top layer, and the top layer holds both the logical part (such as GPU) and the HBM itself, where the photon layer serves only as the communication layer between them. But this approach is expensive-it requires an intermediary layer and photon I / O support for both local logic and HBM.

Another method is to completely separate the HBM memory bank from the chip package, which greatly simplifies the chip manufacturing difficulty and packaging cost of HBM and logic compared with the first method, and avoids the digital-to-optical conversion in complex circuits.

From a feasibility point of view, this approach sounds the most reasonable, but it also means a deeper rethinking of the server specification and may result in a "HBM memory cube"-the HBM memory library is preloaded on the specified photon interface.

Since you have decoupled the HBM from the chip itself and assumed a standard optical communication interface, you can think of it as an "upgradeable" product, similar to the RAM suite.

The PPT also details Samsung's HBM packaging and other technologies, including 2.5D and 3D solutions, and briefly outlines the competition of Moore's Law and the increasing cost in the field of semiconductor miniaturization to explain why photonics is indeed a part of our future. At present, it is hard to say how far HBM will go, but this road should continue forever.

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