Advanced IC Packages Keep Silicon And Systems Flying

摘要

These days, the news coming out of the semiconductor industry is as much about packaging as it is about silicon. Advances in IC design and fabrication have shrunk die sizes, multiplied I/O counts, and revved up signal speeds. In turn, these results have spurred many packaging developments. As designers migrate their chip designs to smaller surface-mount and chip-scale packages (CSPs), those die-size reductions help focus efforts on minimizing packaging device size. Greater amounts of I/O on the chip have led to the development of ball-grid arrays (BGA), with ball counts approaching 1500 at the high end and pitches as close as 0.5 mm.