• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.318-328
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• 2011

Stage-level reconfigurable chip multiprocessor (CMP) aims to achieve highly reliable and fault tolerant computing by using interwoven pipeline stages and on-chip interconnect for communicating with each other. The existing crossbar-switch based stage-level reconfigurable CMPs offer high reliability at the cost of significant area/power overheads. These overheads make realizing large CMPs prohibitive due to the area and power consumed by heavy interconnection networks. On other hand, area/power-efficient architectures offer less reliability and inefficient stage-level resource utilization. In this paper, I propose a hierarchical multiplexing interconnection structure in lieu of crossbar interconnect to design area/power-efficient stage-level reconfigurable CMP. The proposed approach is able to keep the reliability offered by the crossbar-switch while reducing the area and power overheads. Experimental results show that the proposed approach reduces area by up to 21% and power by up to 32% when compared with the crossbar-switch based interconnection network.

• Journal of the Microelectronics and Packaging Society
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.61-71
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• 1999

The recent trend toward higher frequencies, miniaturization and lower-cost in wireless communication equipment is demanding high density packaging technologies such flip chip interconnection and multichip module(MCM) as a substitute of conventional plastic package. With analyzing the recently reported research results of the RF flip chip, this paper presents the technical issues and advantages of RF flip chip and suggest the flip chip technologies suitable for the development stage. At first, most of RF flip chips are designed in a coplanar waveguide line instead of microstrip in order to achieve better electrical performance and to avoid the interaction with a substrate. Secondly, eliminating wafer back-side grinding, via formation, and back-side metallization enables the manufacturing cost to be reduced. Finally, the electrical performance of flip chip bonding is much better than that of plastic package and the flip chip interconnection is more suitable for Transmit/Receiver modules at higher frequency. However, the characterization of CPW designed RF flip chip must be thoroughly studied and the Au stud bump bonding shall be suggested at the earlier stage of RF flip chip development.

• Journal of the Microelectronics and Packaging Society
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.13-21
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• 1999

Flip chip assembly directly on organic boards offers miniaturization of package size as well as reduction in interconnection distances resulting in a high performance and cost-competitive Packaging method. This paper describes the investigation of alternative low cost flip-chip mounting processes using electroless Ni/Au bump and anisotropic conductive adhesives/films as an interconnection material on organic boards such as FR-4. As bumps for flip chip, electroless Ni/Au plating was performed and characterized in mechanical and metallurgical point of view. Effect of annealing on Ni bump characteristics informed that the formation of crystalline nickel with $Ni_3$P precipitation above $300^{\circ}C$ causes an increase of hardness and an increase of the intrinsic stress resulting in a reliability limitation. As an interconnection material, modified ACFs composed of nickel conductive fillers for electrical conductor and non-conductive inorganic fillers for modification of film properties such as coefficient of thermal expansion(CTE) and tensile strength were formulated for improved electrical and mechanical properties of ACF interconnection. The thermal fatigue life of ACA/F flip chip on organic board limited by the thermal expansion mismatch between the chip and the board could be increased by a modified ACA/F. Three ACF materials with different CTE values were prepared and bonded between Si chip and FR-4 board for the thermal strain measurement using moire interferometry. The thermal strain of ACF interconnection layer induced by temperature excursion of $80^{\circ}C$ was decreased with decreasing CTEs of ACF materials.

• Proceedings of the International Microelectronics And Packaging Society Conference
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• 2001.11a
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• pp.146-150
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• 2001

Microwave model and high-frequency measurement of the ACF flip-chip interconnection was investigated using a microwave network analysis. S-parameters of on-chip and substrate were separately measured in the frequency range of 200 MHz to 20 GHz using a microwave network analyzer HP8510 and cascade probe. And the cascade transmission matrix conversion was performed. The same measurements and conversion techniques were conducted on the assembled test chip and substrate at the same frequency range. Then impedance values in ACF flip-chip interconnection were extracted from cascade transmission matrix. ACF flip chip interconnection has only below 0.1nH, and very stable up to 13 GHz. Over the 13 GHz, there was significant loss because of epoxy capacitance of ACF. However, the addition of SiO$_2$filler to the ACF lowered the dielectric constant of the ACF materials resulting in an increase of resonance frequency up to 15 GHz. High frequency behavior of metal Au stud bumps was investigated. The resonance frequency of the metal stud bump interconnects is higher than that of ACF flip-chip interconnects and is not observed at the microwave frequency band. The extracted model parameters of adhesive flip chip interconnects were analyzed with the considerations of the characteristics of material and the design guideline of ACA flip chip for high frequency applications was provided.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.35 no.6
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• pp.1152-1155
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• 2013

A cost-effective and simple solder on pad (SoP) process is proposed for a fine-pitch microbump interconnection. A novel solder bump maker (SBM) material is applied to form a 60-${\mu}m$ pitch SoP. SBM, which is composed of ternary Sn3.0Ag0.5Cu (SAC305) solder powder and a polymer resin, is a paste material used to perform a fine-pitch SoP through a screen printing method. By optimizing the volumetric ratio of the resin, deoxidizing agent, and SAC305 solder powder, the oxide layers on the solder powder and Cu pads are successfully removed during the bumping process without additional treatment or equipment. Test vehicles with a daisy chain pattern are fabricated to develop the fine-pitch SoP process and evaluate the fine-pitch interconnection. The fabricated Si chip has 6,724 bumps with a 45-${\mu}m$ diameter and 60-${\mu}m$ pitch. The chip is flip chip bonded with a Si substrate using an underfill material with fluxing features. Using the fluxing underfill material is advantageous since it eliminates the flux cleaning process and capillary flow process of the underfill. The optimized bonding process is validated through an electrical characterization of the daisy chain pattern. This work is the first report on a successful operation of a fine-pitch SoP and microbump interconnection using a screen printing process.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.81-88
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• 2005

In this paper, interface circuits that are suitable for point-to-point interconnection with an over 1 Gbps data rate per pin are proposed. To achieve a successful data transfer rate of multi-gigabits per-second between two chips with a point-to-point interconnection, the input receiver uses an on-chip parallel terminator of the pass gate style, while the output driver uses the pullup and pulldown transistors of the diode-connected style. In addition, the novel dynamic voltage level converter (DVLC) has solved such problems as the access time increase and valid data window reduction. These schemes were adopted on a 64 Mb DDR SRAM with a 1.5 Gbps data rate per pin and fabricated using a 0.10 ${\mu}m$ dual gate oxide CMOS technology.

• Journal of the Microelectronics and Packaging Society
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.55-59
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• 2015

Novel low-volume solder-on-pad (SoP) process is proposed for a fine pitch Cu pillar bump interconnection. A novel solder bumping material (SBM) has been developed for the $60{\mu}m$ pitch SoP using screen printing process. SBM, which is composed of ternary Sn-3.0Ag-0.5Cu (SAC305) solder powder and a polymer resin, is a paste material to perform a fine-pitch SoP in place of the electroplating process. By optimizing the volumetric ratio of the resin, deoxidizing agent, and SAC305 solder powder; the oxide layers on the solder powder and Cu pads are successfully removed during the bumping process without additional treatment or equipment. The Si chip and substrate with daisy-chain pattern are fabricated to develop the fine pitch SoP process and evaluate the fine-pitch interconnection. The fabricated Si substrate has 6724 under bump metallization (UBM) with a $45{\mu}m$ diameter and $60{\mu}m$ pitch. The Si chip with Cu pillar bump is flip chip bonded with the SoP formed substrate using an underfill material with fluxing features. Using the fluxing underfill material is advantageous since it eliminates the flux cleaning process and capillary flow process of underfill. The optimized interconnection process has been validated by the electrical characterization of the daisy-chain pattern. This work is the first report on a successful operation of a fine-pitch SoP and micro bump interconnection using a screen printing process.

• Proceedings of the International Microelectronics And Packaging Society Conference
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• 2001.04a
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• pp.35-43
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• 2001

Flip chip assembly on organic substrates using ACAs have received much attentions due to many advantages such as easier processing, good electrical performance, lower cost, and low temperature processing compatible with organic substrates. ACAs are generally composed of epoxy polymer resin and small amount of conductive fillers (less than 10 wt.%). As a result, ACAs have almost the same CTE values as an epoxy material itself which are higher than conventional underfill materials which contains lots of fillers. Therefore, it is necessary to lower the CTE value of ACAs to obtain more reliable flip chip assembly on organic substrates using ACAs. To modify the ACA composite materials with some amount of conductive fillers, non-conductive fillers were incorporated into ACAs. In this paper, we investigated the effect of fillers on the thermo-mechanical properties of modified ACA composite materials and the reliability of flip chip assembly on organic substrates using modified ACA composite materials. Contact resistance changes were measured during reliability tests such as thermal cycling, high humidity and temperature, and high temperature at dry condition. It was observed that reliability results were significantly affected by CTEs of ACA materials especially at the thermal cycling test. Results showed that flip chip assembly using modified ACA composites with lower CTEs and higher modulus by loading non-conducting fillers exhibited better contact resistance behavior than conventional ACAs without non-conducting fillers. Microwave model and high-frequency measurement of the ACF flip-chip interconnection was investigated using a microwave network analysis. ACF flip chip interconnection has only below 0.1nH, and very stable up to 13 GHz. Over the 13 GHz, there was significant loss because of epoxy capacitance of ACF. However, the addition of $SiO_2filler$ to the ACF lowered the dielectric constant of the ACF materials resulting in an increase of resonance frequency up to 15 GHz. Our results indicate that the electrical performance of ACF combined with electroless Wi/Au bump interconnection is comparable to that of solder joint.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2003.07b
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• pp.823-826
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• 2003

FPGA-based logic emulator with lane gate capacity generally comprises a large number of FPGAs connected in mesh or crossbar topology. However, gate utilization of FPGAs and speed of emulation are limited by the number of signal pins among FPGAs and the interconnection architecture of the logic emulator. The time-multiplexing of interconnection wires is required for multi-FPGA system incorporating several state-of-the-art FPGAs. This paper proposes a circuit partitioning algorithm called SCATOMi(SCheduling driven Algorithm for TOMi)for multi-FPGA system incorporating four to eight FPGAs where FPGAs are interconnected through TOMi(Time-multiplexed, Off-chip, Multicasting interconnection). SCATOMi improves the performance of TOMi architecture by limiting the number of inter-FPGA signal transfers on the critical path and considering the scheduling of inter-FPGA signal transfers. The performance of the partitioning result of SCATOMi is 5.5 times faster than traditional partitioning algorithms. Architecture comparison show that the pin count is reduced to 15.2%-81.3% while the critical path delay is reduced to 46.1%-67.6% compared to traditional architectures.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.47 no.1
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• pp.94-101
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• 2010

Optimization of interconnects among processors and memories becomes important as multiple processors and memories can be integrated on a Multi-Processor System-on-Chip (MPSoC). Since the optimal interconnection architecture is usually dependent on the applications, systematic design methodology for various data transfer requirements is necessary. In this paper, we focus on bus interconnection for MPSoC applications which use 4 ~ 16 processors. We propose a new systematic bus design methodology under performance constraints using Single Arbitration Multiple Bus Accesses (SAMBA) style bus architectures. Optimized bus architecture is found to satisfy performance constraints for a single or multiple applications. When compared to the unoptimized architecture, our method can reduce the bus switch logic circuits significantly (by more than 50% sometimes). Furthermore, low cost bus architectures can be found to satisfy the performance constraints for multiple applications.