Efficient Approach for Electrical Design and Analysis of High-Speed Interconnect in Integrated Circuit Packages

Abstract

In recent integrated circuit (IC) packages, the structure of the interconnect is highly complex, and the effect of high-frequency parasitics is significant. These factors increase the number and level of design variables and extend the analysis frequency range to tens of gigahertz. As a result of the high dimensions of the design space, it is difficult to reduce the design gap between the current design approach and the physical limits of the practical IC-package interconnect. In this paper, we present an efficient approach for designing and analyzing the electrical characteristics of the high-speed interconnect in IC packages. The proposed approach is developed using a hybrid method involving the design of experiments, the domain decomposition method, and the finite-element method. We present a procedure to identify critical design variables for the IC-package interconnect, and we derive a method to recombine the impedance parameters of a segmented interconnect. The proposed hybrid method is verified by comparing its characteristic impedance (Z o ) with the Z o value from a full-wave simulation of a complete interconnect. We demonstrate that the proposed hybrid method significantly reduces the design space of the IC-package interconnect so that we can efficiently and rapidly obtain the optimized solution, thereby improving the system performance.Electronics 2020, 9, 303 2 of 15 A difficulty in IC-package design is that the results of the electrical and thermomechanical designs are affected by each other, as they share common design variables, necessitating a tradeoff design. To efficiently obtain an optimized solution for both designs, a multiphysics simulation scheme is preferred; however, such a scheme is not suitable for the development of practical applications [1,2]. During industrial developments of an IC package, thermomechanical and electrical engineers separately perform simulations and analyses for their own goals and iteratively modify their designs by communicating with each other. It is time-consuming to optimize a tradeoff design, because both the electrical and thermomechanical characteristics are predicted via computationally expensive methods.Additionally, the package types are continuously evolving into complex multichip packages such as the embedded multimedia card, the embedded multichip package, and universal flash storage. From the viewpoint of electrical design, these package types significantly increase the difficulty of IC-package design, because they employ high-density ICs vertically and horizontally stacked in the package substrate, as well as differential interconnects of SERDES devices for high-speed IC communications. In particular, high-speed interconnect design is one of the crucial parts of real IC-package design, which is the focus of this study. The reason why it is critical is that the use of high-speed interconnect in the state-of-the-art IC package dramatically increases; however, its analysis and optimization method become more difficult and less efficient [3][4][5].As the...

Electromechanical Coupling Parameter Identification for Flexible Conductor Wire Interconnection Considering Interaction Effect in Microwave Circuits

“…Microwave circuits are widely used in the fields of Internet of Things (IOT) communication, radar detection, electronic countermeasures and so on. As the key component of a high frequency electronic system, the development of the microwave integrated circuit is developing towards high speed, high reliability, multi-function and miniaturization [1][2][3]. In the microwave circuit, on one hand, with the increase in the electromagnetic transmission frequency, the influence of the structure of the microwave circuit interconnection on the signal transmission is becoming more and more intensified.…”