Ousted Seagate CEO boards Vertical Circuits

Chip stacks

By Chris Mellor • Get more from this author

Posted in PCs & Chips, 4th May 2009 15:33 GMT

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Ousted Seagate CEO Bill Watkins is back at work, as a board member at Vertical Circuits, a maker of thin interconnects used to stack chips vertically.

Watkins was suddenly ousted at Seagate on January 9th, being replaced by chairman Steve Luczo. He joined the board of start-up Vertical Circuits in March.

Vertical Circuits develops and licenses thin 3D conformal interconnect packaging technologies that enable semiconductor chips to be stacked vertically with less space needed for the chip-to-chip interconnects. All the die surface connect pads are re-routed to the edge of the chip, and vertical interconnects, using jet-dispensing silver filled polymer, are produced between a lower and an upper chip.

This technology can be used to vertically stack flash memory chips in hand-held devices and get more flash into the same vertical space than by other stacking methods.

Thirty-two or more chips can be stacked in this way - and in a much lower height than you could using other die-stacking interconnections. Also, the technology can be used to stack any type of semiconductor die.

Watkins also joined the board of electronics manufacturer Flextronics in April. ®

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