Intel has announced that it’s made a chipmaking breakthrough with PowerVia, a completely new way of delivering power to chip transistors by moving power routing to the backside of a wafer. Two papers about the backside power technology will be presented at the 2023 VLSI Symposium on June 11-16 in Kyoto, Japan, including a third paper that will explain Intel’s research into more advanced methods to deploy PowerVia. Intel 20A and Intel 18A will be the first to introduce both PowerVia backside power technology and RibbonFET gate-all-around technology, Intel has confirmed.
“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.”
From an Intel press release:
The solution that Intel and leading-edge chipmakers are all working toward is called “backside power,” to find a way to move the power wires below the transistor to the “back” side of the chip and thus leave the interconnect or “front” side cleanly focused only on interconnection.
The benefits aren’t limited to manufacturing. The test chip the Intel team used to prove out the approach — called Blue Sky Creek and based on the Efficient-core (E-core) coming in Intel’s forthcoming Meteor Lake processor for PCs — demonstrated that PowerVia solved both problems caused by the old pizza method. With separated and fatter wires for power and interconnection, “you get better power delivery and you get better signal wiring.”
For your average computer user, this means more efficient speed. Get work done faster and with less power, the promise of Moore’s Law delivered again. As the second paper dryly concludes, “The Intel E-core designed with PowerVia demonstrates 5% frequency improvement and 90% cell density with acceptable debug times as Intel 4.” Sell confirms this is a “substantial” frequency boost for just moving wires around.