Whilst process node technologies and Moore’s Law are slowing down, manufacturers and chip designers are looking to new creative solutions to further enable device and performance scaling. Advanced packaging technologies are one such area where we’ve seen tremendous innovations over the past few years, such as the introduction of silicon interposers and integration of HBM-memory or the shift towards modularisation through chiplet designs.
Silicon interposers pose cost challenges as they are expensive and require quite a large silicon footprint, whilst chiplet designs which use conventional packaging on organic substrates are limited by I/O bandwidth and power efficiency. A solution to this problem has been the industry’s introduction of intermediary silicon dies that connect two logic chips together – but only in a limited scope, not using the same footprint as a full silicon interposer. Intel’s EMIB (Embedded Die Interconnect Bridge) has been the recently most talked about implementation of such technology.
