Intel Reveals Glass Substrates To Advance Chip Development: In Line With Moore’s Law

Using a combination of materials, researchers managed to steer cascades of electrons through finely etched circuits at ultrahigh speeds.

The most widely-used substrate material for this, is silicon, due to its excellent semiconductor properties, low cost, and high integration density. Then, there is the substrate, which is the base layer on which the active and passive components of computer chips are built from.

It provides the mechanical support, electrical isolation, and thermal dissipation for the chips.

When speaking about the ways to improve chip design, research tend to focus on things like cramming in more cores, increasing clock speeds, shrinking transistors and 3D stacking. Rarely do researchers think about the overall package substrate, the very thing that actually holds and connects all of those components.

Intel is making a breakthrough, when it said that it reinvented how people should see semiconductors, by announcing one that is made of glass.

What Intel did, was transforming a specialized sheet of glass the size of a small tabletop into paperclip-sized rectangular sandwiches of circuitry.

So instead of relying on the usual epoxy-like organic resin, Intel wants to use glass substrate because it offers the speed, power and real estate necessary for the chipmaker to shift to new technology packaging method called "chiplets," which pack more into a single larger processor.

As a result, it can accommodate 10 times the power and data connections its organic substrates can, meaning that it's able to deliver much more data in and out of the chip.

By using glass, not only the company can cram in more chiplets, but can also prevent flexing and instability, which tend to occur when using existing silicon package.

This is because the glass substrate can run at a higher temperature.

Glass brings several advantages to these hot and huge chips, said Rahul Manepalli, an Intel fellow who leads Intel's module engineering work.

"Glass substrates can tolerate higher temperatures, offer 50% less pattern distortion, and have ultra-low flatness for improved depth of focus for lithography, and have the dimensional stability needed for extremely tight layer-to-layer interconnect overlay," Intel said in a press release.

This in turn allows Intel to fit 50% more chips on a glass substrate than an organic one of the same size.

With these capabilities, the company claims glass substrates will also lead to a ten-fold increase in interconnect density, as well as allow for "ultra-large form-factor packages with very high assembly yields."

The company announced this ahead of its Intel Innovation 2023 conference in San Jose, California.

The end goal, is creating a new way to sustain Moore's Law, which charts progress in cramming more circuitry elements called transistors into a processor.

In 1971, Intel’s first microprocessor had 2,300 transistors. This time, Intel's Ponte Vecchio supercomputing processor has more than 100 billion.

Much of that doubling came from miniaturizing the width between chip circuits.

To protect it and plug it into a circuit board, it was housed in a package that looked like a flat caterpillar with metal legs that carried power and data.

Things then evolved from those soldered legs to hundreds of pins that looked like a tiny bed of nails covering the bottom of a processor. Things then evolved, when researchers found better ways to create more electrical contacts to circuit boards.

This led to the development of packages that have flat metal contact patches on the bottom of the package. The chip is installed when hundreds of pounds of force mash it onto a circuit board.

In short, chip packaging advanced dramatically, evolving from crude solders to things that are on an atomic level.

The thing is, chip technology has advanced fast at the first dew decades, before slowing down, as chip layers are now extremely tiny.

Intel is certain, because utilizing the technology should allow it to outpace rivals in the era where the demand for processing power has surpassed the industry's ability to deliver it, explained Intel's Creative Strategies analyst Ben Bajarin.

"One hundred percent, this is going to end up leading to a competitive advantage," Bajarin said.

"Basically, the innovation is done," said Ann Kelleher, the executive vice president leading technology development at Intel. The glass substrate technology "gives us an ability to ultimately get higher performance for our products."

At this time, Intel is already losing from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) and Samsung that build processors for hundreds of electronics companies.

And more, Intel manufacturing progress was also stalled for several years.

While the technology promises huge advancements, there are challenges Intel has to face.

For example, glass is brittle, meaning that the handling of the material is different than that of organic resin.

Because of this, Intel adapts glass-handling equipment, and also receive help from professionals with experience in handling glass, including those in the display industry, which have experience creating screens as small as smartwatch displays to as big as flat-panel TVs.