Firm Hopes to Stack Chips in Its Favor : Technology: Irvine Sensors has developed a semiconductor packaging technique for shrinking microprocessors. But mass production is still elusive.
Imagine trying to stack a pile of 128 computer-processor chips so precisely that the thousands of tiny circuits on each of the chips match exactly. Then try to fit the package in a space the size of a sugar cube.
That’s what a small chip research firm called Irvine Sensors has tried to do for 10 years. It has been a lonely task--and an expensive one, swallowing more than $30 million in research funds at a company with minuscule sales of $3.5 million last year.
Until now, the Irvine-based company worked in obscurity. But as the world’s multibillion-dollar chip industry runs out of ways to reduce the size of electronic circuitry, Irvine Sensors’ three-dimensional chip-stacking technology has become a center of attention.
“We developed the technology a couple of years before it was needed,” said James Alexiou, chairman and president. “Now the market is closing the gap.”
While some industry experts describe Irvine Sensors’ technology as promising, its success rests on the company’s ability to adapt it for mass production. Some experts are skeptical about whether that can be done.
The earliest chips in the 1960s could fit anywhere from 100 to 1,000 circuit components--such as transistors--on a piece of silicon. Now semiconductor companies are packing millions of components on thumbnail-size chips.
In the past decade, chip makers have improved speed by reducing the size of chips, the building blocks of computers and other electronic equipment. The more dense the circuits, the shorter the distance that an electrical signal must travel between chips--and the faster the processing time.
Now there are physical limits to reduction. The tiniest of dust particles can ruin the sophisticated circuitry, and electrical signals start to interfere with each other if circuits are packed too densely.
Chip packaging is becoming a hot research topic at companies such as Texas Instruments, Boeing Co., Apple Computer, International Business Machines and others. The Microelectronics & Computer Technology Corp., an Austin, Tex., semiconductor research consortium, is working on new packaging technology with the goal of ensuring that the United States retains its lead in the field.
The stakes could be high: Market researcher Dataquest Inc. of San Jose estimates that semiconductor packaging could be an $18-billion market worldwide by 2000.
“What (Irvine Sensors) brings to the party is what a lot of companies are striving for, and that’s a three-dimensional package,” said Alan Hirschberg, associate director of engineering at Teledyne Microelectronics, a chip maker in Los Angeles.
Some technology companies are looking at creating multiple chips side by side on a single module or stacking perhaps 10 chips in a single package. Irvine Sensors’ high-density approach may be the most ambitious, industry experts said.
“It’s an exciting technology, and the Irvine Sensors approach has the most promise to achieve such a level of density,” said Eric Fossum, a research supervisor at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. “It’s a very difficult technology problem, but it only takes one bright person to have a good idea.”
At Irvine Sensors, the bright person was chief scientist John Carson. He and Alexiou founded the company in 1980 to develop sensors for a missile-defense system even before President Reagan proposed the controversial Star Wars program in 1983.
At the time, the technology was way ahead of the computer industry’s ability to apply it commercially. Computer makers were finding other, less complicated ways to produce smaller, faster microchips. And Irvine Sensors was unable to find a company willing to help finance its research.
The company, which went public in 1982, lost $8.8 million between 1983 and 1990. It was able to stay afloat mostly with the help of Pentagon research grants. The military was interested in applying the technology in missiles.
Developing the technology took 10 years and three times the money originally expected because of the intricacy of the electronics involved. The company, for example, had to look at more than 1,000 types of glue before it found the right one.
“I don’t think anybody else was crazy enough to do it,” said Chief Financial Officer John Stuart. “We’re the only ones that had the arrogance.”
