Cost-effective multichip module manufacture using passive substrate fault tolerance

The widespread use of multichip module (MCM) technology is currently restricted by high substrate cost, poor substrate yield and low quality level of mounted components: the known good die (KGD) problem. This paper examines three yield enhancing fault tolerance techniques suitable for use with conventional (passive) substrates with the aid of a generic processor-memory MCM architecture. The use of spare memory dies and a paged address space is shown to be a very effective solution to the KGD problem for this particular architecture.