Posted on Tuesday, July 21 2015 @ 11:43 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
UMC, world's third-largest chip foundry, announced it has entered volume production for the Through-Silicon-Via (TSV) technology used on AMD's new Radeon R9 Fury series and the Radeon Rx 300 series. In the press blurb below, AMD confirms it will be using UMC as a supply chain partner for its new line of Radeon products.
United Microelectronics Corporation (NYSE:UMC;TWSE: 2303) ("UMC"), a leading global semiconductor foundry, today announced that it has entered volume production for the Through-Silicon-Via (TSV) technology used on the AMD Radeon™ R9 Fury X, the flagship GPU in the recently announced Radeon™ R 300 Series of graphics cards. The AMD Radeon™ R9 Fury X GPU utilizes UMC's TSV process technology and die-stacking to fuse HBM DRAM with AMD's GPU on a silicon interposer, enabling the GPU to deliver unmatched memory bandwidth of 4096-bit and quadruple the performance-per-watt over the current GDDR5 industry standard.
“AMD has a successful history of delivering cutting-edge GPU products to market,” said S.C. Chien, vice president of Corporate Marketing and co-chair of the TSV committee at UMC. “This volume production milestone is the culmination of UMC's close TSV collaboration with AMD, and we are happy to bring the performance benefits of this technology to help power their new generation of GPU products. We look forward to continuing this fruitful partnership with AMD for years to come.”
Bryan Black, senior fellow at AMD said, “UMC's long track record of bringing innovative technologies from the R&D stage to volume production for customer products was a compelling reason for us to engage with them as our foundry for the interposer and associated TSV technology. They have again proven their ability to execute successfully with TSV on our latest high-performance GPU, and we are pleased to have them as a valuable supply-chain partner for our exciting new line of Radeon products.”
AMD's GPU and stacked HBM dies are placed on top of UMC's interposer that employs a TSV process. Through a CMOS redistribution layer and advanced micro-bumping, these ICs communicate with each other on the interposer, thus enabling the cutting-edge performance and form factor of AMD's Radeon™ R9 Fury X. AMD's silicon interposer with TSV is manufactured at UMC's specialty 300mm Fab 12i in Singapore.
