Through-silicon via

In electronic engineering, a through-silicon via (TSV) or through-chip via is a vertical electrical connection (via) that passes completely through a silicon wafer or die.

TSVs are high-performance interconnect techniques used as an alternative to wire-bond and flip chips to create 3D packages and 3D integrated circuits.

Compared to alternatives such as package-on-package, the interconnect and device density is substantially higher, and the length of the connections becomes shorter.

[12] The first three-dimensional integrated circuit (3D IC) stacked dies fabricated with a TSV process were invented in 1980s Japan.

[13] In 1989, Mitsumasa Koyonagi of Tohoku University pioneered the technique of wafer-to-wafer bonding with TSV, which he used to fabricate a 3D LSI chip in 1989.

[14] The inter-chip via (ICV) method was developed in 1997 by a Fraunhofer–Siemens research team including Peter Ramm, D. Bollmann, R. Braun, R. Buchner, U. Cao-Minh, Manfred Engelhardt and Armin Klumpp.

[20] In 2013, SK Hynix manufactured the first High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) module based on TSV technology.

The work was supported by Qualcomm, and then later Nvidia, Xilinx and Altera, who were looking for ways to beat Intel at its game - increasing on-die memory, but then by stacking, rather than scaling.