January 17, 2014
Rao R Tummala, Pettit Chair Professor and Director, Georgia Tech
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Rao R Tummala, Pettit Chair Professor and Director, Georgia Tech
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We started packaging because of
the need to have to test the chips and to connect with other components on the
system board to form electronic systems. So transistor scaling, following
Moore's Law, was the basis of packaging and all electronics, making electronics the largest single, $1.5T global
industry, serving a variety of individual industries that span computing,
communications, consumer, automotive and others.
The basis for this industry is
a result of singular focus in
transistor
scaling, leading to a 5B transistor chip, involving dozens of semiconductor
companies around the globe.These chips were packaged mostly as single chips, in which case the value of
packaging has been minimal.
Packaging
became highly valuable, more valuable
than ICs when on-chip transistor integration was inadequate to meet the system
needs. This led to multichip packaging
in 1980s, a concept very similar to
wafer scale integration in which the original wafer is diced into individual chips, tested and
yielded but then reconstituted back into
multichip wafer, interconnecting all the chips onto a non-silicon substrate with highest wiring
density.This was called 2D then and 2.5D
now. The birth of cellphone industry in 1980s made these into 3D stack of
memory chips , initially with peripheral wirebonds, outside the chips and now with so-called TSVs within the
stack.
But the electronics
landscape is changing, driven by a new industry that integrates all these
individual industries into so-called "Smart Mobile Systems" that promise to perform
every imaginable function, in smallest size and lowest cost that every global
person could afford. They perform not only computing, communications,
entertainment but also banking, replacing credit cards and healthcare by
monitoring with ultra-small camera within body and communicating to
smartphones, predicting heart attacks and other ailments, long before they
happen.Cognitive computing announced by IBM can add a variety of functions such
as recognizing people and objects, and detecting quality of foods and
environment.
Such a new frontier, however, requires
revolutionary technologies that I call
System
Scaling, to add to transistor scaling that started 60 years ago. Packaging
is no longer simply for semiconductors, following Transistor Scaling. It is for smart systems
following System Scaling. Smart mobile systems are
expected to drive unparalleled electronics technology paradigms in system
miniaturization, functionality, and cost. The system scaling technologies are
many that cut across electrical, mechanical, thermal, materials, bio and chemical process sciences and engineering.
This is a new industry that can be expected to be as big, if not bigger
than the entire current $1.5T
electronics and IT industry.
Rao R Tummala, Pettit Chair Professor and Director
Georgia Tech
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