Interconnect Devices, Inc. history

John Heidenreich Manager of Interconnect Technology, IBM Research, oversaw IBM’s work on copper since May 1994

In 1997, IBM rocked the technology industry when it announced chips with copper interconnects that could make microprocessors faster, smaller and less expensive than chips made with aluminum interconnects—the industry standard at the time.

On September 1, 1998, IBM announced the shipment of the world’s first copper-based microprocessors.

Ahmet Ceyhan received his M.S. in electrical and computer engineering from Rutgers University, New Jersey in 2009.

A collection of the most pressing challenges documented in the 2012 ITRS Interconnect chapter (yellow representing identified but immature solutions, and red representing challenges with no known manufacturable solutions) is shown in Table 1.

D. Nikonov and I. Young, "Overview of beyond-CMOS devices and a uniform methodology for their benchmarking," arXiv preprint arXiv: 1302.0244 (2013).

In March 2016, at the Linaro Connect in Bangkok, Stephen Boyd did a presentation titled “Dissecting the 2M LoC QC fork”. He gave an overview of how different a SoC vendor kernel is from the mainline Linux.

It was merged in January 2019 and is available in the Linux kernel since v5.1.

The research pipeline of the semiconductor industry involves increasingly radical potential solutions to carry technology advancement through dimensional scaling to beyond-conventional CMOS. Many logic devices are under investigation to extend Moore’s Law to beyond the year 2020.