Silex Microsystems, the world’s largest pure-play MEMS foundry, and BroadPak, a provider of ultra-high performance 2.5D silicon interposer and 3D integration technologies, today announced the immediate availability of their jointly developed silicon interposer solution in high-volume manufacturing. Leveraging the advanced interposer co-design methodology and system integration expertise of BroadPak with the proven interposer manufacturing capabilities of Silex, this new solution delivers a cost-effective, ultra-high performance, reliable and high-yield silicon interposer that will enable a broader market to realize the benefits of 2.5D packaging.
While market analyst firm Yole Dévelopement expects the market for interposers to grow by 88 percent annually through 2017, Silex and BroadPak believe their partnership can accelerate this market adoption by overcoming the cost, engineering, reliability and supply chain bottlenecks. 3D-IC designs are widely recognized as the next step towards meeting the growing performance requirements such as increased bandwidth, reduced latency, and lower power. 2.5D silicon interposers, which are double-sided die used to stack chips side-by-side, have emerged as the most effective way to accelerate the adoption of 3D-IC, but these solutions are costly and complex, which presents significant design, integration, reliability and supply chain challenges. Recognizing these bottlenecks, Silex and BroadPak believe their new 2.5D silicon interposer product solves these hurdles that have prevented many companies from participating in this space.
“This partnership is a critical step in enabling companies to benefit from silicon interposers because most companies don’t have the integration techniques and methodologies to even start a 2.5D IC design and the current solutions have been too costly and high-risk to implement,” said Peter Himes, Vice President of Marketing and Strategic Alliances for Silex Microsystems. “The combined Silex/BroadPak solution opens up this market to a very large portion of customers that have been unable to compete in this space due to overwhelming cost, engineering and integration challenges.”
“BroadPak and Silex have created a technical solution and the supply chain infrastructure that the industry has been waiting for,” said Farhang Yazdani, President and CEO of BroadPak. “To date, silicon interposer technology has been limited to a very small number of companies. We are now enabling the mass adoption of silicon interposer by lowering the cost and providing the co-design, heterogeneous integration and the required supply chain infrastructure in a complete package.”
The Silex/Broadpak finished product consists of a robust interposer for 2.5D packaging, which has been designed and characterized for thermal-stress and signal integrity performance by BroadPak and also optimized for manufacturing by Silex. The unique challenges of 2.5D/3D-IC packaging require special engineering expertise to deliver cost effective solutions to meet the reliability, warpage and signal/power integrity requirements of the packaged components as well as an optimized and robust manufacturing process.