Comment by axus
Might be jumping in without reading, but the chips you cut out of the wafer have to be delivered to physically different locations.
Might be jumping in without reading, but the chips you cut out of the wafer have to be delivered to physically different locations.
Normally yes. But they're using a whole wafer for a single chip! So it's actually a good idea.
I guess the issue is how do you design your routing fabric to work in the edge regions.
Actually I wonder how they are exposing this wafer. Normal chips are exposed in a rectangular batch called a reticle. The reticle mask has repeated patterns across it, and it is then exposed repeatedly across the wafer. So either they have to make a reticle mask the full size of the wafer, which sounds expensive, or they somehow have to precisely align reticle exposures so that the joined edges form valid circuits.