Half-conductive coupling interconnection technology for digital transmission between CMOS chips

This paper describes how to use half-conductive coupling (HC-coupling) to obtain digital interconnections between two flip-chip standard CMOS integrated circuits. For process simplicity, the HC-layer can be unpatterned and the CMOS chips do not require any post-processing steps. Measurements of a complete HC-coupling, digital communication link show reliable operation up to 100 Mb/s channel speed. The two flipped prototype CMOS chips were fabricated in 0.8-/spl mu/m, 5-V CMOS. The I/O pads' pitch was 150 /spl mu/m.