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From the Editor
A School for Ants?
December 31, 1969 |
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
There's no doubt in anyone's mind that the majority of electronic products are shooting for higher density, more miniaturization, and smaller form factors. Product designers, PCB manufacturers, semiconductor foundries, and packaging providers are all shaving off microns in hopes of attaining lean, tiny, powerful end-products. However, in the midst of all this scaling down, the human factor bungles things up. If a chip is practically microscopic, and the packaging barely adds an iota of bulk, then challenges arise for the assembler, who must, to make matters worse, attach it to a high-density, fine-pitch PCB. The electronics assembler must ensure that the component is soldered in place accurately, with correct orientation and centered pads. If problems arise, manual rework may be required on such delicate and miniaturized components that they may better fit into a doll's electronics, or, as Ben Stiller ineptly exclaims in the movie Zoolander, in "a school for ants."
As component sizes shrink, accuracy and reliability become more intertwined. Even the slightest inaccuracy in component placement could break the chain of electrical interconnection, damaging the end product. If solder is printed slightly askew, the miniscule leads of a component or micro-BGA balls may not have enough solder with which to reflow into a viable joint. Well, if all this sounds daunting, there's help and more challenges on the horizon.
Hiding Dies, a consortium supported by the European Union (EU) and dedicated to embedding die into high-density, high-performance PCBs, might be able to take some of the pressure off the electronics assembler. The group, which supports high-density integration of dice into electronics substrates, discovered methods to embed active components into the layers of a PCB, thinning out the crowd of ICs and other devices mounted to the surfaces of a PCB, and giving printers, dispensing tools, component placement systems, rework technicians, and other steps and workers in the assembly process a little more breathing room around the components left on the top, and bottom, of the board. ICT Results, a news service that tracks developments of EU-funded consortia, reports that electronics manufacturers will see PCBs incorporating this technology in about three years.
Each embedded microchip is roughly 50 µm, and the group has produced modules at about 100 µm. Chips are placed side-by-side inside the laminated polymer build-up layers of a board, eliminating extraneous packaging, protecting die, and enhancing RF capabilities, explains Andreas Ostmann, researcher at the Technical University of Berlin, a project leader. Interconnects are achieved with common PCB techniques, such as laser via drilling. Merging chips and substrates could lead to very flat electronics systems, or, with more components surface mounted, very high functional densities are possible. PCB manufacturer AT&S, another partner in Hiding Dies, performed customer evaluations and will begin adding these embedded chips to PCB products in 2009.
So, some of the weight will be lifted from the assemblers' shoulders when active components are tucked inside the circuit board, benefiting everything from automotive to television and appliance electronics, according to ICT Results' assessment. However, on the front end of things, semiconductor chips are facing a new wave of miniaturization that could lead to 01005s and smaller components threatening the vacuum pick-up nozzles and vision-alignment capabilities of pick-and-place systems in the not-so-distant future. ICT Results reports that two research projects, NanoCMOS and its follow-up Pullnano, are paving the way for 45-, 32-, and even 22-nm chips. Consumer devices may boasts 45-nm chips by 2009. STMicroelectronics, which took the lead on both EU-funded semiconductor projects, plans to commercialize 32-nm products starting in 2011, and to roll out 22-nm nodes a few years later, ICT Results states, adding that practical full-scale commercialization is still over a decade away. Where does it stop? According to Gilles Thomas, director of R&D cooperative programs at STMicroelectronics, nodes will shrink to about 16 or 11 nm before Moore's Law peters out.
Even with smaller nodes and dense I/Os coming from the foundries, electronics assemblers can still rely, to some degree, on the packaging houses to build die into components that facilitate assembly. Endicott Interconnect Technologies (EI), STATS ChipPAC, and various other packaging suppliers are rolling out system-in-package designs that pull multiple chips off the board and into some form of stack inside one package. EI announced this week that its can reduce PCB real estate by up to 27× by putting bare die together with thermal solutions onto its PTFE-based HyperBGA or CoreEZ organic build-up, thin-core flip chip. And thankfully, consumers seem to like miniaturization but love functionality, so those 32- and 22-nm nodes will likely lead to denser, rather than smaller, chips. Even so, the wafer-level (WLP) and chip-scale package (CSP) types are gaining popularity by leaps and bounds, and the smaller the chip, the smaller the WLCSP.
It seems equipment suppliers are preparing for the added complexity and miniaturization that result from our global lust for innovative, high-performance, pocket-size electronic devices. Valor and Universal Instruments Corporation announced a collaborative product that allows assemblers to import various types of design data into the operating software on Universal machines, driven by Valor's production planning technology vPlan. Integrating data straight from the blueprint into the placement system without human interference or program incompatibility could greatly reduce inaccuracies in developing process parameters for a prototype or new product run. For more on the Dimensions Data Prep Studio software package, read Universal, Valor Partner for Software Integration.
While the intellectually stunted Zoolander found the school's architectural model to be ridiculously small, only big enough for ants, he used a cell phone the size of a dime throughout the movie. If we want Zoolander's mobile handset in the future, we'll have to find more ways to adapt to miniaturization and densification with higher accuracy and finer controls and inspection. But there's always the human factor and really, who can imagine trying to dial up a friend on microscopic number buttons? And how will you watch Zoolander on mobile streaming video with such a diminutive screen?
Meredith Courtemanche, managing editor