Connectivity in Electronic Packaging

This chapter deals with the issue of packaging and interconnects in electronic systems. An electronic system in general consists of multiple subsystem modules in certain form of packages and electrical interconnects between them. A module, in turn, consists of multiple VLSI chips and interconnects. Interconnects often become bottleneck of the performance of electronic systems because the performance gap between the bus bandwidth and processor core speed has increased as the process technology scales. Development in the performance of systems has thus been accompanied by the development of interconnects as well as VLSI chips. Exactly like what happened in the VLSI, the technology of packaging and interconnects has developed tremendously in terms of bandwidths, power dissipation, form factors (physical dimensions), and so forth. In fact, it has always been one of the central issues in the design of systems, involved sophisticated engineering, and required attention from the perspective of dependability. Section 8.1 gives an overview of the requirements for packaging and interconnects and highlights wireless technology for packaging as an emerging technology for packaging or integrating complex systems. Section 8.2 introduces wireless interconnect and compares it with conventional wired interconnect in a few practical examples. Section 8.3 describes the through-silicon via (TSV) in three-dimensional (3D) integration of silicon VLSI from the perspective of performance and dependability and introduces the concept of redundant vias.