Electrical and thermal study of membrane multi-chip module systems

Membrane multi-chip modules (MCMs) have been fabricated to investigate both the electrical design and thermal management of advanced MCM systems. Custom bipolar interface circuits have been interconnected to CMOS VLSI chips, achieving a chip-to-chip delay of 5.6 nsec compared with 7.9 nsec for wire bonded system. Integrated decoupling capacitors and bipolar transistors were utilized to reduce power supply noise across chips by a factor of 3.2. To further decrease the thermal resistance of the systems, water has been used to provide extra heat removal paths. The thermal resistance of the systems has been decreased from 25/spl deg/C/W to 17/spl deg/C/W with the sealed water.