Enhancing overall system functionality and performance with the right packaging solutions

Printed circuit boards (PCBs) are the essential parts to assemble modern electronic circuits. The PCB design and development process has a direct impact on the system cost and time to market. On average, companies report that PCB represents 31% of the overall product cost. Today's electronic circuits and PCB designs are extremely complex. Multi-level mistakes are inevitable during the design and development stages. Cost reduction pressure is also limiting the designers in achieving their goals by reducing a few layers from their PCB stackup or adjusting and tweaking their designs. A paradigm shift in PCB design is underway through partitioning and modularizing the system and circuits to reduce PCB size and complexity, shortens design to market time, and simplifies the overall supply chain. In order to develop a superior product to fulfill a desired functions, good balance needs to be achieved among competing factors such as performance, cost, form factors, manufacturability, design, system flexibility, and supply chain management (Fig 1). A wireless system is usually comprised of several subsystems performing different functions. For example, a typical handset system includes baseband, transceivers, main and diversity FEM, memories, power management, power amplifiers, antenna switch, duplexer filter, etc. In this day and age, system integration is mandatory in order for end use products to offer superior and competitive products Compared to an SoC solution, system level integration at the packaging level may provide benefits such as cost effectiveness, flexibility, and a shorter development cycle. A concurrent development methodology between device and package design will definitely help the industry to understand the nature of system integration on a package.