Assembly-Related Chip/Package Co-Design of Heterogeneous Systems Manufactured by Micro-Transfer Printing

Technologies for heterogeneous integration have been promoted as an option to drive innovation in the semiconductor industry. However, adoption by designers is lagging behind and market shares are still low. Alongside the lack of appropriate design tools, high manufacturing costs are one of the main reasons. Micro-transfer printing (μTP) is a novel and promising micro-assembly technology that enables the heterogeneous integration of dies originating from different wafers. This technology uses an elastomer stamp to transfer dies in parallel from source wafers to their target positions, indicating a high potential for reducing manufacturing time and cost. In order to achieve the latter, the geometrical interdependencies between source, target and stamp and the resulting wafer utilization must be considered during design. We propose an approach to evaluate a given μTP design with regard to the manufacturing costs. We achieve this by developing a model that integrates characteristics of the assembly process into the cost function of the design. Our approach can be used as a template how to tackle other assembly-related co-design issues - addressing an increasingly severe cost optimization problem of heterogeneous systems design.