High performance graphics cards, whether professional, server or game, have a common feature: they require as much bandwidth, as low usage as possible and reduced card size in most cases.
Logically, this requires a different strategy in the consumer game market, where these sectors are less important due to the limitations of game engines, operating systems and of course, other available accessories around.
TSMC CoWoS: Intel Foveros-based process
As with any good method, CoWoS has been getting several different versions of it over time and over the years. Each type is assigned a number, in order to improve that: CoWoS-1, CoWoS-2, CoWoS-3, in the most illuminated CoWoS-4 where TSMC is currently and released last year.
Its first edition was in 2012, so the company developed into one version every two years. But before you know your progress let's get to the basics, what is CoWoS?
CoWos either Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate based on its English accent, what it accomplishes is that an integrated circuit of two points and five dimensions is coupled to silicon and TSV with put together to obtain high performance systems.
That is to say, it is a way to package several chips at a level of 2.5 called 2DD, which combines many matrices into the process using a silicon incloser, thus achieving better performance and better communication performance. They happen.
Focused on the graphics card environment, CoWoS combines logic computing, three-dimensional memory chips and a new silicon substrate (7 nm yet) to give life to both NVIDIA (Tesla) cards in particular, as well as those of AMD (Radeon Instinct or Vega 20 for example).
The future goes with 3D installation
Currently, TSMC only works with 2,5D ICs, which we have already seen on GPUs such as the NVIDIA P100 or Vega 20, becoming the first in the industry to work with the 7 nm lithographic process, pulling multiple chiplets together in several batteries, HBM2.
But the company will not give up its efforts to defeat Intel, which is now integrating the 3D process with Foveros, because TSMC is working on a 3D package called So3D, which, according to recent information, has continued to grow and increase in importance as the months go by and appear to be nearing completion.
