Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1299286
OCTOBER 2020 I PCB007 MAGAZINE 13 Horner: Time to market is becoming very criti- cal. Catching up is getting harder and harder because technology is moving so fast, so be- ing involved is critical. Some vendors are ap- proaching this by just putting everything under the same umbrella. We see foundries doing the IC design, fabrication, and the package. Is that the right approach? I don't know. That would eliminate others from entering the market. But at the same time, by having some of these standards or having tools that enable the collaboration, you can have a chance to suc- ceed in having an optimal solution in a timely manager. By having unified interfaces, tools can talk to each other. That's another thing because when you have so many point tools, getting the information from one stage of the design to another stage gets inefficient. Most IC design tools do not communicate with PCB design tools. The PCB design tools are usually driven off of PCs using Microsoft operating sys- tems, whereas IC designs run off Linux-based operating systems. Johnson: If you have people with various job functions in different companies who need to talk together, then the design tools they use are going to need to enable that collaboration. Horner: Right now, I see a big need around analysis, as I men- tioned. I can model the PCB and extract the parasitic and the traces, model it, bring it in- to the same environment, and do an end-to-end analysis of my simulation. I can bring a clump of information that represents a PCB, another chunk of informa- tion that represents the pack- age, and a chunk of information that represents the silicon and simulate all of them together. This ensures that the signal that is intended to leave the sili- con gets to the board and maybe to the other side or to another device, or whatever is supposed to drive a cable or something to somewhere else. Modeling becomes very critical. There are tools that allow you to do an extraction of either S-parameter models or SPICE extractive models that allow you to do a SPICE simula- tion or any of the other analysis that uses those inputs to do the simulations. Johnson: You need to bring together the man- ufacturing supply chain as a part of the de- sign process. Passing that information to all of those different domains of expertise is going to be important. Are we going to see hetero- geneous integration chips in large scale con- sumer products? Horner: We are moving to that. As I said, this is expensive, and it's very customized right now. But I envision that we are going to move to the consumer level. We're talking to people who are looking at some of the consumer-level ap- plications. Automotive is going to need it as well. The need for high levels of performance and integration is driving us out of the single die concept. We're going to see exponential growth in the need for multi-die in a pack- age. IoT already needs antennas and such, and Figure 1: The need for heterogeneous integration has fostered interest in 3D stacking and packaging strategies. (Source: HIR 2019)