system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How many layers are there in a modern integrated circuit?

I'm getting how the raster dictates density of elements in IC in the horizontal plane over the wafer. But as I understand, there's the third dimension - so far mostly untapped because of heat dissipation necessity; the bit of wafer in a CPU is a rather flat square, not a cube. Still, if my understanding is correct, there's more than a single layer of the components on the wafer, they are stacked to a degree. How many layers though? And how thick such a layer is?
gpt
Depends on the process, of course. The current state of the art is somewhere around a 14nm process with 13 layers.

Also, flash memory makers do "die stacking" where they take flash chips and physically stack them on top of each other, adding tiny wire interconnects later. They might do 16, 32, or more dies stacked on top of each other. That's one way the been able to achieve the ssd densities we have today.