Optical Waveguides Integrated with Sea-of-Leads WLP

摘要

In the future ― some say the very near future ― it's likely that clocking signals will be distributed throughout the chip using optics. With this approach, the light signal is generated off the chip by a laser, sent through optical waveguides built on the chip, eventually reaching some key distribution points (between 4 and 256) where they are decoded into electrical signals (see "Electrical Beats Optical for Short Distances," p. 32). Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta) and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Troy, N.Y.) have moved this one step closer to reality by integrating optical waveguides with sea-of-leads (SoL) wafer-level packaging (WLP) technology. SoL is a new high-density packaging technology that extends wafer-level batch fabrication of multilevel interconnect networks to include the chip's I/O leads (see Semiconductor International, April 2002, p..61).