By Dr. Phil Garrou, Contributing Editor

IMAPS now “Googleable”

Of upmost importance to researchers at Universities, Research Institutes and even Commercial Companies is the ability of others to find their publications.

For years, a pet peeve of mine with IMAPS (the International Microelectronics and Packaging Society) is that once your work was published it was …well…lost. Mind you I was Technical VP and then President of the Society in 1997 so I’m not some complaining outsider. I have been saying this for more than 20 years. Certainly their journal and proceedings are “archival” in the technical sense of the word. Both are bound and printed and available to individuals and libraries for posterity, but many of their conferences containing key publications are only available if you know they exist and go to the IMAPS web page to download them.

In the 1990s most of the key papers on multichip modules (MCMs) were put into the conference of the same name that many of us sponsored through IMAPS. It was a great Conference, but try finding those papers now unless you have copies of all those proceedings.

Nothing has changed more in my lifetime then how we write reports and share data. In 1975, my first year in industry, we wrote report drafts on yellow legal paper and gave them to the office secretarial pool to type for us. They went back and forth a couple of times (since they couldn’t read my handwriting) and figures were added after they were drawn on a draft board.

Literature searching was done in the library where you combed through books and journals till you found what you were looking for. Once you found a key paper you went through all the references in that paper and went backwards like that till you were pretty sure you had found everything that was worthwhile.

All that changed with the computer and the internet. The computer which we got individually in our offices ~ 1985 (best I can recall) caused the unemployment of a lot of young women in the secretarial pool, but it sure increased my productivity in terms of putting a report together. Internet searching of the scientific literature came a bit slower, but by the late 1990s, or certainly by the time Google Scholar came into being in 2004, most researchers simply put their queries into the Google and up popped more references than you could read.  Everything was now available, well everything that Google searched. You can also easily see where this leads. If everyone only references things that are searchable in Google, then after a few years the only references you can find are those that are searchable by Google. Not so great for scientists publishing in non searchable sources.

The Europeans caught on to this problem first and we saw IMAPS conferences in Europe requesting co-sponsorship of IEEE so that their work would be put into IEEE Explore (yes its Google searchable).

It has taken awhile, but after a lot of bitching by myself and others and a lot of hard work by IMAPS staff everything is now searchable back to 2010. Not only the journal and the annual fall meeting but also key conferences like the Device Packaging Conference (DPC). YES – all the slides presented at the DPCs (since 2010) are now searchable and downloadable. I have tested this out myself and sure enough Google now finds them. For more details try www.imapsource.org/

Georgia Tech Interposer Conference (GIT 2015)

Finishing up our look at the GIT, lets look at Intels EMIB and the SPIL / Xilinx SLIT

EMIB

Intel is still keeping design flow and ground rules for EMIB (embedded multi die interconnect bridge) close to the vest and I did not see much new from Bob Sankman.

Certainly the EMIB eliminates a chip attach operation since there is no Si interposer, but the BGA substrate sure looks a whole lot more complex to me. It certainly is an elegant solution, but I’m not convinced it is the low cost solution till I hear from customers what these modules will really cost. It certainly is of interest that Altera has announced a Stratix 10 to be done with EMIB.

SLIT

Xilinx and SPIL were he first to announce TSV free high density interconnect more than a year ago. See IFTLE 215, “STATS Acquisition; Will SLIT replace TSV?”]

Xilinx indicates that the UMC/SPIL version of CoWoS, SSIT is ready for production.

SLIT offers

– 65nm BEOL design rules                                                                                                                                             – non TSV interconnection                                                                                                                                                    – reduced CAPEX                                                                                                                                                                              – less inspection metrology steps                                                                                                                                             – SLIT patent issued to Xilinx

Xilinx compares SLIT to other solutions below:

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