Heterogeneous Integration: The new component in the world of IoT

This paper focuses on how Heterogeneous Integration can be instrumental in accelerating Internet of Things (IoT) growth by bringing about fundamental changes in how the electronics industry thinks about and creates integrated circuits. Integration is not a new concept. We have been creating semiconductor components for decades by integrating more transistors on silicon. Integration has allowed us to put billions of transistors on one device. These transistors have been used to create memories, processors, power management devices and sensors. However, optimizing transistor level design for these different components (cpu, memory, power management) meant that each was implemented on a different ‘flavor’ of semiconductor material making it difficult, if not impossible, to implement all these components, properly optimized on a single semiconductor process. But there is a relatively new integration concept that allows us to integrate, on a semiconductor substrate, a device with heterogeneous semiconductor processes, and even non silicon-based devices. We have called it Heterogeneous Integration. In other terms, it is called System in Package (SiP) technology.