Here At Last! Automated Verification Of Heterogeneous 2D/3D Package Connectivity


By Michael Walsh and Jin Hou with Todd Burkholder The heterogeneous integration of multiple ICs in a single package along with high-performance, high-bandwidth memory is critical for many high-performance computing applications. After everything has been heterogeneously integrated and packaged, such designs feature complex connectivity with many hundreds of thousands of connections, making i... » read more

Interconnects Essential To Heterogeneous Integration


Designing and manufacturing interconnects is becoming more complex, and more critical to device reliability, as the chip industry shifts from monolithic planar dies to collections of chips and chiplets in a package. What was once as simple as laying down a copper trace has evolved into tens of thousands of microbumps, hybrid bonds, through-silicon vias (TSVs), and even junctions for optical ... » read more

Bump Reliability is Challenged By Latent Defects


Thermal stress is a well-known problem in advanced packaging, along with the challenges of mechanical stress. Both are exacerbated by heterogenous integration, which often requires mingling materials with incompatible coefficients of thermal expansion (CTE). Effects are already showing up and will likely only get worse as package densities increase beyond 1,000 bumps per chip. “You comb... » read more

Looking Inside Of Chips


Shai Cohen, co-founder and CEO of proteanTecs, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about how to boost reliability and add resiliency into chips and advanced packaging. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: Several years ago, no one was thinking about on-chip monitoring. What's changed? Cohen: Today it is obvious that a solution is needed for optimizing performanc... » read more

Why Wafer Bumps Are Suddenly So Important


Wafer bumps need to be uniform in height to facilitate subsequent manufacturing steps, but a push for 100% inspection in packaging in mission-critical markets is putting a strain on existing measurement technologies. Bump co-planarity is essentially a measure of flatness. Specifically, it measures the variation in bump height, which may have a target, for example, of about 100 microns. As a ... » read more

Advanced mm-Wave And Terahertz Measurements With Cascade Probe Stations


The strong market needs to embed multiple functionalities from different semiconductor processing technologies into a single system continue to drive demands for more advanced 3DIC packaging technologies. Dimensions of copper pillar micro-bumps are consistently reduced in every new technology node to facilitate the 3D stacking of multiple dies so that overall system performance can be improved.... » read more

Die-To-Die Stress Becomes A Major Issue


Stress is becoming more critical to identify and plan for at advanced nodes and in advanced packages, where a simple mismatch can impact performance, power, and the reliability of a device throughout its projected lifetime. In the past, the chip, package, and board in a system generally were designed separately and connected through interfaces from the die to the package, and from the packag... » read more