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United States Patent6728113
Knight , ; et al.April 27, 2004
Title
Method and apparatus for non-conductively interconnecting integrated circuits
Abstract
Apparatus is described for capacitively signalling between different semiconductor chips and modules without the use of connectors, solder bumps, wire-bond interconnections or the like. Preferably, pairs of half-capacitor plates, one half located on each chip, module or substrate are used to capacitively couple signals from one chip, module or substrate to another. The use of plates relaxes the need for high precision alignment as well as reduces the area needed to effect signalling, and reduces or eliminates the requirements for exotic metallurgy.
Inventors:Knight; Thomas F. (Belmont, MA), Salzman; David B.  (New York, NY)
Assignee:Polychip, Inc. (Bethesda, MD)
Appl. No.:082328
Filed:June 24, 1993
Current U.S. Class:361/760 361/780 361/782 361/783 257/664 257/724 257/728 257/924 257/E23.01 257/E23.172 333/246 333/247 
Field of Search:361/760-763,765,807,303-305,321.2,766,782,811,306.1,764,767,768,770,771,783,784,803 174/250,253,255,259,261,260 257/296,307,678,904,924 333/181,184,185,202,204,236,238,245-247 439/68,69,83,620
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Other References
Turlik, Iwona, (Ed.), "Prolog to The Special Section on Multichip Module Technology," Proc. IEEE, vol. 80, No. 12 (Dec. 1992). .
Martin et al., "A Practical Approach to Producing Known-Good Die," ICEMM Proc. '93, International Conference and Exhibition on Multichip Modules, pp. 139-151 (Apr. 1993). .
Begay et al., "Getting to Know Your MCM Die," ICEMM Proc. '93, International Conference and Exhibition on Multichip Modules, pp. 160-165 (Apr. 1993). .
Neugebauer, et al., "Multichip Module Designs for High Performance Applications," Proceedings of NEPCON West (1989), reprinted in Multichip Modules: Systems Advantages, Major Constructions, and Materials Technologies, Johnson et al. (Eds). (1991). .
Balde, "Multichip Packaging and the Need for New Materials," Journal of Electronic Materials (Feb. 1989), reprinted in Multichip Modules: Systems and Advantages, Major Constructions, and Materials Technologies, Johnson et al. (Eds.) (1991). .
Doane and Franzon, (Eds.), MCM Technologies and Alternatives, The Basics, pp. 1-35, 37-131, 817-843 (1992). .
Chappell et al., "Fast CMOS ECL Receivers With 100-mV Worst-Case Sensitivity," IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, vol. 23, No. 1 (Feb. 1988). .
Morris, (Ed.), Electronics Packaging Forum, vol. 1, State Univ. of NY, Binghamton, Van Nostrand Reinhold, NY, pp. 1-116 (1990). .
IBM Technical Disclosure Bulletin, vol. 6, No. 11, Apr. 1964 New York, pp. 43-44 "Modular Read Only Store". .
Knight and Salzman, "Manufacturability of Capacitively Coupled Multichip Modules" 1994 Proceedings 44.sup.th Electronic Components and Technology Conference, May 1994. .
Turlik, Iwona, (Ed.), "Prolog to The Special Section on Multichip Module Technology," Proc. IEEE, vol. 80, No. 12 (Dec. 1992). .
Martin et al., "A Practical Approach to Producing Known-Good Die," ICEMM Proc. '93 International Conference and Exhibition on Multichip Modules, pp. 139-151 (Apr. 1993). .
Begay et al., "Getting to Know Your MCM Die," ICEMM Proc. '93, International Conference and Exhibition on Multichip Modules, pp. 160-165 (Apr. 1993). .
Neugebauer, et al., "Multichip Module Designs for High Performance Applications," Proceedings of NEPCON West (1989), reprinted in Multichip Modules: Systems Advantages, Major Constructions, and Materials Technologies, Johnson et al. (Eds). (1991). .
Balde, "Multichip Packaging and the Need for New Materials," Journal of Electronic Materials (Feb. 1989), reprinted in Multichip Modules: Systems Advantages, Major Constructions, and Materials Technologies, Johnson et al. (Eds.) (1991). .
Doane and Franzon, (Eds.), MCM Technologies and Alternatives, The Basics, pp. 1-35, 37-131, 817-843 (1992). .
Chappell et al., "Fast CMOS ECL Receivers With 100-mV Worst-Case Sensitivity," IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, vol. 23. No. 1 (Feb. 1988). .
Morris, (Ed.), Electronics Packaging Forum, vol. 1, State Univ. of NY, Binghamton, Van Nostrand Reinhold, NY, pp. 1-116 (1990). .
IBM Technical Disclosure Bulletin, vol. 6, No. 11, Apr. 1964 New York, pp. 43-44 "Modular Read Only Store". .
Knight and Salzman, "Manufacturability of Capacitively Coupled Multichip Modules" 1994 Proceedings 44.sup.th Electronic Components and Technology Conference, May 1994..~
Primary Examiner: Vigushin; John B.
Attorney, Agent or Firm:Pennie & Edmonds LLP
Claims

What is claimed is:
1. A modular electronic system comprising: a substrate; a ground plane in said substrate; a semiconductor chip; means for powering said chip; means for capacitively signalling between said chip and said substrate; and signal leads connected on said substrate and said chip to said means for capacitively signalling.

2. A modular electronic system as defined in claim 1 wherein said means for capacitively signalling comprises first and second coupled half-capacitors, said first half-capacitor being associated with said chip and said second half-capacitor being associated with said substrates said first and second coupled half-capacitors comprising effectively overlapping conductive regions separated by a gap.

3. A modular electronic system as defined in claim 2 wherein at least one of said conductive regions comprises a plate.

4. A modular electronic system as defined in claim 2 wherein the capacitance of said means for capacitively signaling can be varied by changing the effective area of overlap between said conductive regions.

5. A modular electronic system as defined in claim 4 further comprising a plurality of coupled half-capacitors, a substantial area of said chip and a substantial portion of the area of said substrate overlapping said chip being covered with substantially overlapping half-capacitors.

6. A modular electronic system as defined in claim 5 wherein at least one half-capacitor on said chip is connected to a chip ground, power, or other common reference signal.

7. A modular electronic system as defined in claim 5 wherein at least one half-capacitor on said substrate is connected to a substrate ground, power, or other common reference signal.

8. A modular electronic system as defined in claim 4 wherein the area of one of said conductive regions is greater than the area of the other of said conductive regions.

9. A modular electronic system as defined in claim 4 wherein the shape of one of said conductive regions differs from the shape of the other of said conductive regions.

10. A modular electronic system as defined in claim 4 wherein said first half-capacitor overlays circuitry.

11. A modular electronic system as defined in claim 2 wherein portions of said chip are passivated, but not said first half-capacitor.

12. A modular electronic system as defined in claim 2 wherein said gap is at least partially filled with a dielectric.

13. A modular electronic system as defined in claim 12 wherein said dielectric comprises a uniform material.

14. A modular electronic system as defined in claim 12 wherein said dielectric accommodates mechanical guides.

15. A modular electronic system as defined in claim 12 further including passivation distinct from said dielectric.

16. A modular electronic system as defined in claim 15 wherein said dielectric has a substantially greater dielectric constant than does said passivation.

17. A modular electronic system as defined in claim 12 wherein said dielectric is bonded to said substrate.

18. A modular electronic system as defined in claim 12 wherein said dielectric provides a means for affixing said chip to said substrate.

19. A modular electronic system as defined in claim 1 further comprising a transmission line coupled to a first means for capacitively signalling.

20. A modular electronic system as defined in claim 19 wherein said transmission line is further coupled to a second means for capacitively signalling.

21. A modular electronic system as defined in claim 19 wherein said transmission line is further coupled to a conductive junction.

22. A modular electronic system as defined in claim 19 wherein a first multiplicity of said means for capacitively signaling between said chip and said substrate occupies a first area at a first pitch, a second multiplicity of means for conductively signaling occupies a second area of said substrate at a second pitch, a multiplicity of said transmission lines connects said first and second areas, and said second area is larger than said first area.

23. A modular electronic system as defined in claim 19 wherein a first multiplicity of said means for capacitively signaling between said chip and said substrate occupies a first area at a first pitch, a second multiplicity of means for conductively signaling occupies a second area of said substrate at a second pitch, a multiplicity of said transmission lines connects said first and second areas, and said second pitch is larger than said first pitch.

24. A modular electronic system as defined in claim 19 wherein a first multiplicity of said means for capacitively signaling between said chip and said substrate occupies a first area at a first pitch, a second multiplicity of means for capacitively signaling occupies a second area of said substrate at a second pitch, a multiplicity of said transmission lines connects said first and second areas, and said second area is larger than said first area.

25. A modular electronic system as defined in claim 19 wherein a first multiplicity of said means for capacitively signaling between said chip and said substrate occupies a first area at a first pitch, a second multiplicity of means for capacitively signaling occupies a second area of said substrate at a second pitch, a multiplicity of said transmission lines connects said first and second areas, and said second pitch is larger than said first pitch.

26. An electronic system comprising: a semiconductor chip; a substrate; a ground plane in said substrate; a plurality of electronic devices implemented on said chip, a signal lead of at least one of said plurality of electronic devices coupled to a first half-capacitor attached to said chip; and, a second half-capacitor attached to said substrate and capacitively coupling a signal to said first half-capacitor.

27. A modular electronic system comprising: a substrate; a chip; means for powering said chip; means for capacitively signaling between said chip and said substrate comprising first and second coupled half-capacitors, said first half-capacitor being associated with said chip and said second half-capacitor being associated with said substrate, said first and second coupled half-capacitors comprising effectively overlapping conductive regions separated by a gap that is at least partially filled with a dielectric; and a power connector extending through said dielectric.

28. A modular electronic system comprising: a substrate; a semiconductor chip; means for powering said chip; means for capacitively signalling between said chip and said substrate; and signal leads connected on said substrate and said chip to said means for capacitively signalling; wherein said means for capacitively signaling operates despite a substantial misalignment between said substrate and said chip.

29. A modular electronic system comprising: a substrate; a ground plane in said substrate; a chip; means for powering said chip; means for capacitively signaling between said chip and said substrate comprising first and second coupled half-capacitors, said first half-capacitor being associated with said chip and said second half-capacitor being associated with said substrate, said first and second coupled half-capacitors comprising effectively overlapping conductive regions separated by a gap; and an additional half-capacitor associated with one of said chip and said substrate.

30. A modular electronic system comprising: a first module having a plurality of semiconductor electronic devices, a first half-capacitor and at least one signal lead connecting said electronic devices to said first half-capacitor; a second module having a second half-capacitor, said modules being positioned such that said first and second half-capacitors provide a capacitive signal path between said first and second modules; and contacts for supplying DC power to said first module from a source outside said first module.

31. A modular electronic system as defined in claim 30 wherein said fist and second half-capacitors are shaped such that the admittance of said capacitive signal path is substantially unaffected by a small misalignment between said first and second modules.

32. A modular electronic system as defined in claim 30 wherein the area of one of said half-capacitors is greater than the area of the other of said half-capacitors.

33. A modular electronic system as defined in claim 30 wherein the shape of one of said half-capacitors differs from the shape of the other half-capacitor.

34. A modular electronic system as defined in claim 33 wherein said shape of said one of said half-capacitors is designed to accommodate anticipated misalignment.

35. A modular electronic system as defined in claim 30 including further paired half-capacitors such that said capacitive signal path is distributed among multiple capacitors.

36. A modular electronic system as defined in claim 30 wherein said first module is positioned relative to said second module by motion transverse to said capacitive signal path.

37. A modular electronic system as defined in claim 30 wherein said second module is a cable, said cable including at least one non-coaxial wire.

38. A modular electronic system as defined in claim 30 wherein said first module further includes a transmission line that is connected to a plurality of transmission lines.

39. A modular electronic system as defined in claim 30 further comprising means for varying the admittance of said capacitive signal path by changing the effective area of overlap between said half-capacitors.

40. A modular electronic system as defined in claim 39 wherein said means for varying the admittance includes mechanical devices.

41. A modular electronic system comprising: a substrate; a ground plane supported by said substrate; a semiconductor chip; a first half-capacitor attached to said semiconductor chip; a plurality of electronic devices implemented on said chip, a signal lead of at least one of said plurality of electronic devices coupled to said first half-capacitor; and a second half-capacitor attached to said substrate and capacitively coupling a signal to said first half-capacitor.

42. The modular electronic system of claim 41 further comprising contacts for supplying DC power to said semiconductor chip from a source outside said chip.
Description
FIELD OF THE INVENTION

The present invention relates generally to the field of electronic and microelectronic packaging and, more particularly, to a multichip package, a method for assembling, testing and repairing systems so packaged, and a method for communicating between circuits so packaged, via capacitive coupling. Of particular interest are digital systems, meaning systems which contain important constituents that operate according to the rules of multistate or binary logic.

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

Packaging Technology

Electronic systems are usually implemented as hierarchical packages of components. Passive or active electronic elements, such as resistors and transistors, and their wiring are typically combined into memory or logic units, which are then combined into circuits and devices, which are combined into larger functional units, and so forth up to the level of a system.

Each higher level of hierarchy grants the designer greater productivity, but compounds costs for connecting packages together logically and physically. Communication of data and timing among devices at each of these levels requires signal interconnection means, which the package provides. The package also provides powering means and fulfills other requirements such as physical support, heat removal and protection.

By convention, there are five hierarchical packaging levels 0-4, although these levels are not rigidly defined. An exemplary scale in the hardware system hierarchy is the naked semiconductor wafer, sometimes called an undiced "Level 0" package. Many components are formed simultaneously on a common substrate during fabrication stages, even if the substrate is subsequently separated into subunits. For instance, wiring, memory or logic gates may be assembled into integrated circuits on the surface of a semiconductor wafer and then cut into individual dies. Examples of dies include microelectronic devices implemented on semiconductor materials, superconductors bearing Josephson Junctions, and materials bearing other quantum interference devices.

Individual dies are typically mounted into "Level 1" packages, which provide mechanical stability, protection, cooling and heat dissipation, power and grounding, and interconnection of signal lines (including clocking) to other packages. Examples include DIP, ceramic, surface mounted and socketed packages.

A "Level 2" package is a module carrying one or more Level 1 or Level 0 packages and interconnecting their signal and power wiring. It typically comprises a printed circuit board (PCB), a printed wiring board (PWB), or a thermal conduction module, and may cluster one or more interconnected packages for these purposes. "Level 3" assemblies further organize the Level 1 and Level 2 packages, typically with backplanes, but do not differ conceptually from Level 2 or Level 1 packages. The "Level 4" package canonically ties together the lower level packages with power supplies, environmental systems, mechanical systems, peripherals, and so forth to provide system functionality.

A multichip module (a/k/a "MCM") (also known as a "Level 11/2" package) provides modular functionality as a Level 2-like or Level 3-like package for holding and interconnecting multiple dies and/or associated interconnections. At a minimum, an MCM provides the signal distribution, and power is usually distributed by way of the MCM as well. The MCM may also or merely encapsulate its constituent dies as an erstwhile Level 1 or Level 0 package, thereby providing protection. It may also communicate the dies to a heat sinking substrate, thereby providing heat dissipation.

Strictly speaking, an MCM could be treated as a package at any level of hierarchy, as defined in practice by its interconnection topology. Note that the term "chip" is used interchangeably in the industry both in reference to Level 0 dies and Level 1 packages (e.g., a multichip module is usually in fact a multidie module). As used herein, the term chip refers to a Level 0 package or die unless context indicates otherwise. The term "module" or "submodule" as used herein is intended to be general, and can refer to any package level, for example one or more Level 0 dies, one or more Level 1 or Level 0 chips (packaged or not), and of course higher order ensembles.

Present MCM Technologies

An MCM involves two or more dies, whether bare or encapsulated, mounted and conductively coupled to it. It provides power and inter-die signal wiring. In some MCM technologies, the dies are physically bonded to a substrate, and leads that are wire-bonded to peripherally positioned contacts (e.g., pins) supply the conductive connections between the dies and a multichip substrate. Other technologies utilize a "flip-chip" configuration in which the leads of the dies are positioned either peripherally or over much of the die area (such as a pin grid array (PGA) or solder bumps) and are soldered or otherwise bonded to respective contacts on the multichip substrate.

Several families of multichip packaging technology are standard at present. The so-called MCM-L technology utilizes a laminated, organic board substrate to which dies are bonded by flip-chip, tape automatic bonding (TAB), or wire-bonding. In the MCM-C technologies, dies are attached either directly by flip-chip or indirectly in prepackaged carriers to a ceramic thick-filmed substrate. The ceramic substrate is formed either sequentially, by a print and fire process, or by lamination and sequential co-insertion of screened green sheets. The MCM-D technology utilizes deposited thin-film substrates to which dies are then attached as in MCM-C. There are also variations of these three basic MCM technologies. For example, a variation using plastic packages and involving molding compounds and lead frames is the so-called multichip plastic quad packs (MCM-P) technology. Another recent variation involves the use of deposited thin films on a ceramic multichip substrate, referred to alternatively as MCM-DC or MCM-CD, and typically provides inter-die signal wiring in the deposited polymer-metal thin-film layers and power/ground wiring in the co-fired ceramic thick-filmed substrate. All of these technologies are subjects of intense research and invention in industry and universities. (See Rao R. Tummala, "Multichip Packaging--A Tutorial." Proc. of the IEEE, December, 1992.)

Many approaches to the construction of high density multichip modules have been proposed. The IBM C4 technology attaches dies to the multichip module in a flip-chip face-down configuration. The arrangement minimizes the parasitic inductance of the package leads, and allows pad location at any point on the interior of the die. Typically, dies are attached to the module using a reflow-solder approach. Dies are bumped by bonding to each pad several layers of protective metalization followed by a 10-200 micron diameter solder ball. A plurality of dies are then accurately positioned on the multichip module, and reflow-soldered into place. Inspection of the solder joints can be done with thermographic or radiographic techniques, but may be difficult otherwise. Pad location is no longer limited to the die periphery, but is often constrained by thermal coefficient of expansion mismatch between silicon and module to lie within some radius of the center of the die. Repair is carried out by module heating, die removal, and reflow-soldering of replacement die.

"Chips-first" face-up wire-bonding of silicon dies to high density silicon, ceramic, or copper-polyimide modules is similar to conventional hybrid manufacturing technologies, and shares difficulties in rework and bonding yield. The GE/TI process forms a planar wafer-like module from collections of selected loose dies placed face down on a flat surface, and then encapsulates it in a polyimide carrier. After curing, this carrier is flipped over, planarized, and used as a module for further (possibly multilayer) metalization. The major advantages of metalizing on top of planar ensembles of dies include the fine lithography achievable and very small interconnect parasitics.

The process can also be generalized to stacks of dies in 3D. In the Irvine Sensors approach, dies with electrically insulated backs are designed with leads fanned-out to contact pads lined up along an edge, and stacked with those side pads aligned precisely. The exposed side is then cleaned and polished, and interconnect lines are metalized onto it. The package is extremely dense, although heat dissipation can become limiting, but leads must still travel out to the edge and back to route to other die.

In the Cray Computer approach, holes are drilled into a stack of dies in a grid, plated to form a conductive contact with die vias, and then threaded with twisted gold wires, separating the die slightly and supporting them. The package is extremely dense and conceptually trivial, but extremely difficult to manufacture.

Need for MCM Technology

In the present art, it costs much more (in terms of power, latency, performance and circuit real estate) to signal off-die than to stay on-die. Off-die signalling designates communicating between two points, on the same die or different dies, using off-die wiring. A major design goal with the present art is therefore to increase the number of circuits on each die, increasing the ratio to expensive off-die interconnections. However, as the size of a die approaches some economically and technologically feasible limit, the probability that randomly occurring manufacturing defects will produce an unacceptable die rises exponentially in a Poisson distribution. Since slightly larger die yield at significantly lower rates, this so-called "surface-to-volume" (communication-to-computation) ratio severely constrains fabrication yield, hence cost per functioning die.

The need for multichip technologies arises in large part from this inability to produce arbitrarily large semiconductor dies with acceptable yield. Practical limits on die size for a given technology force system designers to partition large digital systems among multiple dies. Unfortunately, such partitioning dramatically impacts system performance since inter-die communication typically inflates packaging costs by tens to many hundreds of percent.

Multichip technologies also offer the possibility of reducing the cost of intra-die communication in modern CMOS technologies. If off-die signalling became somewhat less expensive than at present, at some point it would become preferable to on-die wiring for certain intra-die communication. The implications of this need to be recognized by practitioners of today's MCM art: Dies should be made smaller, at the expense of more interconnects per non-communication gate. Smaller dies have significantly higher yield and lower cost per area, so if designers could employ cheap inter-die communication on MCMs, they could transparently treat a multichip module as if it were a single enormous ensemble of electronic devices (including their interconnections), using small, very high yielding monolithic integrated circuit dies (and modules of them) as the subunits. This would be tremendously useful for designers and cost-effective for semiconductor foundries.

Use of MCMs for intra-die signalling should also have important attractions for low impedance--hence low dispersion--signalling between points on the same die. Low dispersion broadcast is essential for clock distribution, and low dispersion point-to-point is useful in general.

Another application for multichip technologies is in customizing on-die interconnects or engineering change pads. It is valuable to customize interconnects in the manner of a breadboard, within dies up to full wafer-size or among ensembles of dies, in order to rig together specialized functions, test performance, edit out defects, redefine a system's basic connectivity, or perform the functions of engineering change pads. At present, customization generally requires a lengthy (circa six week) logic array masking process, unreliable-laser fusing/breaking of wiring junctions, significant expense in microfabrication of wiring, macro-scale (e.g., wire-wrap) assemblages, lack of durability (e.g., hand-wired jury-rigs), or a combination of these. The enormous value of customization can be exploited with properly designed MCMs.

Inter-die signalling technology trends demand MCM technology. Shorter signal paths directly contribute to higher performance, since they allow shorter delays and faster clock rates (i.e. more operations per second) and wider synchronous instructions (i.e. more operations per clock tick). Dies are generally planar, so the longest signal path will scale as the diameter, or roughly as the square-root of the area. Planar MCMs can be constructed more densely with smaller dies since they ask less wiring overhead for excursions to the edge and back. In principle, the electronic devices a die bears that make it useful could be disposed volumetrically, but in the current art that is uncommon, except for on-die wiring and stacked capacitors. MCMs can in principle be constructed in a space-filling manner, so that the volumetric packing is denser than planar packing, hence signal paths are kept much shorter (e.g., proportional to the cube root of the chip package volume, which is small if the package is thin compared to its area).

The cost of interconnection networks for signal lines generally scales as a function of area (i.e. a proxy for system real estate) and number of layers (i.e. density and layout efficiency), with linear scaling as a goal. The number of leads or number of chips within an area may inflate cost by a significant factor in many packaging technologies, such as those using wire-bonds. Even if a technology avoids scaling as the number of leads or die, if it requires post-processing steps to form a package, as with solder bump conductive couples, it may still be expensive due to yield losses from handling, amortization of costly test/repair cycles, and of course operating and capital costs.

Even if a large and a small system have identical numbers of wires starting and stopping in each average square inch, the wires in the larger system will travel further on average, so account for a greater proportion of system density than in the smaller system. This is the well-known "Law of Numbers," and is a dominant consideration in constraining layout to a minimum number of metalized layers, which generally rises (geometrically) faster than real estate as a chip design grows. Runaway wiring density can in principle choke off the manufacturability of large high performance systems. The requirement for high interconnection density makes MCMs almost inevitable, and rewards volumetric packing as well as the shorter Manhattan distances that accrue to volumetric interconnection.

A further need for multi-chip technology arises from the cost and complexity of combining hybrid materials to exploit properties of each. For instance, an arbitrarily large, cheap silicon CMOS chip would still lack the speed and optical properties of GaAs, while growing one material on the other is inherently more complicated than forming them separately.

A further need arises from the enduring value of packaging hierarchies, wherein standardized packages with well-described components, such as microprocessors, are available commercially with various advantages compared to components or full system-level packaging. Important advantages to using such hierarchies may include lower cost, modular upgradeability, well-characterized behavior, and multiple sourcing. The designer balances competing benefits and costs of a hierarchy: necessarily limiting the degrees of freedom of system design, while commensurately reducing complex system interactions and failure modes.

A further need arises from the difficulty of package manufacture per se. The engineering or manufacturing complexity, process requirements, and cost of the package approach or exceed those of the die, so the cost and turnaround time for the package can become as formidable as those of the die.

Problems of Present MCM Technologies

Despite the intensive research efforts of the past several years, present day MCM technologies still have significant problems in terms of cost, performance, design, manufacturability, reliability and reparability, as well as shortcomings with respect to the needs enumerated above.

Present MCM technologies require significant retooling and/or expensive reorientation of existing integrated circuit ("IC") fabrication lines. High volume is needed to realize cost advantages of MCM packaging, but re-implementing an existing production system (for which high volume demand already exists) to utilize MCM technology typically requires extensive system-wide redesign. System vendors rationally resist such efforts, choosing instead to implement certain clusters of ICs as application specific Ics (ASICs), which generally involves only local redesign of Level 2 boards and Level 1 chips. Accordingly, the relatively high up-front cost of MCM implementation discourages use of MCM technology for systems where large volume cannot be predicted a priori. (See Balde, J. W., "Crisis in Technology: The Questionable U.S. Ability to Manufacture Thin-Film Multichip Modules." Proc. of the IEEE, December, 1992.)

While the electrical performance of TAB, fine-line, or solder bump conductive interconnect can be significantly better than wire-bonding for a conductive interconnect, and pad count is somewhat less constrained, prior art MCM processes often require special processing of wafers or dies prior to assembly to place solder balls or construct metal bonding locations for assembly. The processes also require custom tooling and substantially more sophisticated wafer manufacture post-processing than would be required for standard wafer or packaging lines.

Reparability and die attach yield issues also arise with current MCM technology, principally because of the difficulty in die removal and replacement. Testing the dies in the MCM before it is fully assembled (and paid for) typically accounts for tens of percent of the delivered MCM cost, due to the need for sacrificial test rigs or time-consuming intermediary connections as well as the cost of compensating for parasitics in order to test at operating speeds. Making physical contact with microscopic probes or rigs of probes is slow, and exposes the probe points to mechanical forces leading to misalignments, fatigue, and wearing. If the dies are packaged beyond Level 0, only a fraction of the interconnects may even be visible. Nevertheless, working dies should be selected perfectly before module assembly, due to the expense (or impossibility) of reworking the module. Repair methods are very difficult--essentially a tear down and rebuild--and usually require essentially the same elaborate, expensive assembly technology as used to build the MCM originally.

The difficulties, mechanical constraints and costs of multichip module designs are largely driven by the drawbacks of conductive signalling per se. Conductive signalling is almost universally understood to be inevitable among practitioners of the present art (See Daryl Ann Doane and Paul D. Franzon, Multichip Module Packaging Technology and Alternatives. Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1993). Conductors in general must expose a face in contact to one another; they cannot hide behind shielding or a passivation layer. If there are (re)movable constituents in the electrical path, there will be exposed surfaces, and unless certain materials (e.g., noble metals) are used on exposed surfaces, conductors may be susceptible to oxidation, although some non-metallic conductors avoid the oxidation problems. Troublesome surface chemistry complications include mechanical stability (e.g., whiskering), finite conductance (e.g., charge carrier saturation), and time-dependent material or phase changes (e.g., intermetallic compounds). Non-metal conductors have other chemistry problems. If the entire path is bonded continuously, repair and testing may require physically severing material. Removing conductively mated dies, chips or modules for repair/replacement may entail cutting mechanical linkages and removing solder, metal-metal bonds, pins from sockets, or the like. Such breaks introduce metal fatigue (i.e. increase the likelihood of future failure modes) and contamination by conductive dust. The conductor-conductor junctions will later need to be realigned and restored. Intense localized thermal stresses from (de)soldering may also be involved. Methods for replacement pose severe constraints on the design and manufacture of conductively-coupled components in electronic systems.

Even if these or other approaches were practical in a manufacturing sense, all suffer the series inductance performance costs of conductive signalling. The performance improvement achievable with solder-bumped or wire-bonded dies is fundamentally limited by the excessive series inductance of the solder bump or wire-bond interconnection. State-of-the-art MCM technologies endure much the same performance limitation as current surface mounted IC technologies. Both families of technology require bonding wires, solder bumps, TAB, or their equivalent, to couple signals conductively between the dies and the substrate (for MCMs) or Level 2 package (for surface mounted ICs), which impose parasitic series inductance unavoidably. Parasitic inductance of 50-1000 pH is typical, and introduces significant latency, frequency limitations, and power requirements for signalling off-chip. While the best currently available MCM technologies reduce the disparity between on-die and off-die communication compared to the conventionally quoted ten-to-one ratio for surface mounted IC technologies, there remain significant penalties associated with inter-die signalling on conventional MCMs. Current MCM technologies suffer from mechanical and thermal problems, design and fabrication limitations, power costs, complexity, and expense.

With the present state of the art, technology for conductive signalling is itself directly responsible for many problems with current MCMs. It imposes mechanical and cost limitations on the density, number, and arrangement of signal leads attached to a MCM package or constituent dies in carriers, and generally requires further expense and yet more volume devoted to mounting and interconnecting the leads from chip packages onto Level 2 circuit boards or multichip carrier modules and packaging at all higher levels. Typical Level 1 packages holding a die and its conductive leads are generally much larger than the active area of the contained Level 0 die, due to requirements for spacing out contact pads and attached leads, and MCMs similarly inflate real estate requirements. On each die, fan-out of conductive leads (in order to simplify testing or wiring contact pads) takes up chip real estate. The practical need for a sufficient number of conductive pads, adequately large and well-separated, typically accounts for several tens of percent of the chip's real estate, but can range from a fraction of a percent to essentially all of the chip's real estate. With some MCM technologies, pad bonding locations cannot overlay active circuits, since applied contact probe pressure or other process steps risk damaging the circuits, so pads occupy real estate at the expense of useful electronic devices. That wasted real estate costs money (about $10-1000/square inch). Since present approaches emphasize placing the pads at the perimeter of the die's active area to minimize wiring lengths (or at the center, to minimize thermal expansion mismatch), and pad count is often limited by the available perimeter bonding density of the die, many designs are "pad limited," wasting chip real estate, and/or "pin-limited," leading to large, expensive packages. Other leads which can be used as pin-substitutes include solder, eutectic, or soft metal (e.g., gold) bumps, conductive wires (e.g., copper, silver, or aluminum) lithographed on polyimide or tape, and sharpened probe needles.

Current MCM technologies require special circuitry for interconnecting dies operating at different voltage levels. Dies fabricated from different materials generally use different voltage levels, such as CMOS versus GaAs. Dies designed with different circuit technologies, even in the same material, generally use different voltage levels, such as Si TTL versus Si ECL. Even dies fabricated from the same technology may still use different voltage levels, such as CMOS in silicon at 5.0 volts versus 3.3 volts.

The circuitry supporting signalling is sensitive to manufacturing variations during wafer fabrication. Manufacturing processes produce variation in basic physical parameters (e.g., impedance, capacitance, inductance) absolutely and spatially, across a wafer or between wafers. This variation causes circuitry to produce waveforms of differing spectra, affecting shape and skew, and differing amplitude, affecting thresholds, noise susceptibility, power requirements and termination characteristics. Unreliable waveform spectra and amplitude means that the yield of dies follows a bell curve distribution, with very few able to operate at higher frequencies. Designers have therefore adopted conservative design rules to compensate for performance ranges.

Power must still be provided to the electronic devices in a system, whether the devices are packaged in MCMs or any other level. Nearly all leading MCM designs treat power leads and signal leads the same way at Level 1, which wastes space and loses important opportunities for increasing the density of signal lines.

In short, there remains a significant need for an improved method and apparatus for coupling signals among modules in a modular electronic system which mitigates one or more of the above-explained problems with the present MCM technology. While MCM technology represents an important application domain, the invention, as defined in the succeeding sections, applies broadly to all levels of electronic packaging and interconnection, such as die, wafer, board, MCM, system, etc. It is therefore the inventors' intent that the invention not be viewed narrowly, or only in the context of the preferred MCM embodiment, except where the context inarguably indicates otherwise.

OBJECTS OF THE INVENTION

One object of the invention relates to a method and apparatus for interconnecting modules which mitigates one or more of the previously identified deficiencies in the prior art.

Another object of the invention relates to a method and apparatus for coupling signals among modules which mitigates one or more of the previously identified deficiencies in the prior art.

Another object of the invention relates to a method and apparatus for coupling signals among modules at very high speeds.

Another object of the invention relates to a method and apparatus for providing improved inter-module and intra-module signal coupling without the need for costly or exotic fabrication techniques.

Another object of the invention relates to a modular electronic system having shorter signal paths, and to a method for constructing such a system.

Another object of the invention relates to a modular electronic system wherein at least some of the signals between two dies, between two substrates or between a die and a substrate communicate via capacitive coupling.

Another object of the invention relates to a modular electronic system wherein at least some of the signals between two dies, between two substrates or between a die and a substrate communicate via magnetic coupling.

Another object of the invention relates to a modular electronic system wherein a module couples both capacitively and conductively to other modules.

Another object of the invention relates to a modular electronic system wherein a module couples both magnetically and conductively to other modules.

Another object of the invention relates to a module adapted to couple capacitively or magnetically to other modules in a modular digital system.

Another object of the invention relates to a method and apparatus for integrating modules of physically incompatible materials into a modular electronic system wherein signals couple between nearby, physically incompatible modules via capacitive or magnetic means.

Another object of the invention relates to a method and apparatus for coupling signals between two or more modules without need for additional means to compensate for differences between the chemistry, conducting state, wave phase, fabrication technology, clock rates, voltage levels, numbers of logical states, thermal expansion properties, operating temperature, ambient pressure, or environmental requirements between components.

Another object of the invention relates to a method and apparatus for coupling signals from or to a superconducting module.

Another object of the invention relates to a module comprising a plurality of dies formed by several different fabrication technologies, and a method for assembling and testing such a module.

Another object of the invention relates to a module comprising more technologies or devices than can be supported economically on a single die, and to a method for designing and laying out such a module.

Another object of the invention relates to a module wherein the connections between dies, or between a die and a substrate, are easily reversible, and to a method for reversibly forming and breaking such connections.

Another object of the invention relates to a method of repairing or replacing submodules without tearing down interconnection wiring.

Another object of the invention relates to an MCM wherein neither the process of installing a die nor the process of removing a die damages either the die or a substrate.

Another object of the invention relates to a method and apparatus for identifying and replacing undesirable modules in a modular electronic system.

Another object of the invention relates to a method for improving the performance of a modular electronic system by full speed parametric testing of modules within the system.

Another object of the invention relates to a method for improving the yield of a modular electronic system by full speed testing of modules within the system.

Another object of the invention relates to a method for improving yield of an MCM by full speed testing of chips and larger modules prior to assembly.

Another object of the invention relates to a method for improving the performance of a modular electronic system by selective replacement of modules within the system.

Another object of the invention relates to an MCM comprising a plurality of known-good modules selected by testing in a test fixture having electrical properties substantially identical to those of the MCM substrate.

Another object of the invention relates to an MCM wherein modules are selectively replaced in order to correct or improve system performance.

Another object of the invention relates to modules adapted for full speed testing prior to installation in an MCM, and to a method for testing and installing such modules.

Another object of the invention relates to an MCM wherein modules are attached to a substrate without use of solder or wire-bonding.

Another object of the invention relates to an MCM or other modular digital system wherein a clock signal is distributed with extremely low dispersion, and to a method of distributing clock signals with extremely low dispersion in such systems.

Another object of the invention relates to an MCM wherein digital signals are communicated among dies via transmission lines on the substrate, the transmission lines being capacitively or magnetically coupled to the dies.

Another object of the invention relates to an apparatus and method for coupling a transmission line to a means for capacitively signalling, and to a method and apparatus for terminating such couples.

Another object of the invention relates to a transmission line connected between two means for capacitively signalling and adapted to provide a capacitive path between two separate modules.

Another object of the invention relates to a method and apparatus for connecting two separate modules capacitively or magnetically by coupled transmission lines.

Another object of the invention is a modular electronic system having improved signal-to-noise and higher speed transmission of digital signals between modules.

Another object of the invention relates to a die wherein a substantial number of intra-die connections are routed via off-die signal paths, and a method of designing such a die.

Another object of the invention is a modular electronic system having improved routing, busing, networking, or switching of signals among constituent modules.

Another object of the invention relates to methods for laying out modular electronic systems--entailing optimizing interconnections among devices, circuits, blocks, and modules of any size--and to systems so implemented.

Another object of the invention relates to design of a modular electronic system partitioned into a number of small, high-yielding dies and low cost, high performance inter-die connections.

Another object of the invention relates to a module wherein the negative effects of misalignments from design, manufacture, assembly, or operation are substantially mitigated, and a method of isolating those effects.

Another object of the invention relates to a method of designing, manufacturing, assembling, or operating a modular electronic system which removes the need for long-range physical alignment.

Another object of the invention relates to a method and apparatus for self-aligning a modular electronic system electrically or logically.

Another object of the invention relates to a method and apparatus for providing low-cost, defect-tolerant wafer-scale interconnections in a modular electronic system.

Another object of the invention relates to a method for operating a wafer-scale module in spite of fabrication defects.

Another object of the invention relates to a method and apparatus for reducing the number of packaging hierarchy levels needed for a modular system of a given complexity.

Another object of the invention relates to a modular electronic system supporting many hierarchical layers of modules.

Another object of the invention relates to a modular electronic system using standardized interconnections to serve as a building block for larger systems.

Another object of the invention relates to a method and apparatus for standardizing the assembly of, and the interfaces between, modules in a hierarchical modular electronic system.

Another object of the invention relates to a method and apparatus for reducing the cost of package engineering and manufacturing for modular electronic systems.

Another object of the invention relates to a method and apparatus for reducing the turnaround time and cost for breadboarding or prototyping a modular electronic system.

Another object of the invention relates to a method and apparatus for assembling a modular electronic system from a standardized kit of parts.

Another object of the invention relates to a method and apparatus for reducing the turnaround time and cost for engineering and manufacturing the package for a modular electronic system.

Another object of the invention relates to methods for designing, manufacturing, assembling, and operating systems which are faster, lower-powered, cheaper, or have more logical elements, and to systems so implemented.

Another object of the invention relates to methods for designing, manufacturing, assembling, and operating systems which have preferable packages (e.g., denser, smaller, lighter, tolerant of planar or volumetric constraints), and to systems so implemented.

Another object of the invention relates to modular electronic systems with a high density or number of signal interconnections, and to methods for constructing such systems.

Another object of the invention relates to manufacturing and design methods for scavenging more real estate on wafers for electronic devices than results from methods used in the prior art, and to systems so implemented.

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

One or more of the above objects, as well as other objects and advantages, are provided by the modular electronic system of the invention and the many uses thereof.

Briefly, one aspect of the present invention relates to a modular electronic system comprising at least two modules, at least one of which is powered, and a means for non-conductively (e.g., capacitively or magnetically) communicating between the modules.

Another aspect of the invention relates to an MCM wherein two or more dies communicate via non-conductive signalling means. The MCM preferably comprises a substrate having a plurality of dies affixed thereto. The means for non-conductively signalling preferably comprises coupled half-capacitors, one half-capacitor plate located on a die and the other located on the substrate or another die, the die and the substrate or other die positioned so as to couple the half-capacitor plates.

Yet another aspect of the invention relates to a method and apparatus for assembling, testing and repairing modular electronic systems or MCMs based on the non-conductive signalling techniques of the invention.

Still a further aspect of the invention relates to a modular electronic system or MCM wherein interconnections between elements are non-conductive and, therefore, do not require direct physical contact. The modular system or MCM preferably utilizes the flexibility of the non-conductive junctions to accommodate or dissipate thermal stresses within the system.

A further aspect of the invention relates to a die, chip or module adapted for assembly in a non-conductively interconnected modular system, and including an externally accessible half-capacitor plate and, preferably, a plurality of electronic devices.

Yet another aspect of the invention relates to an MCM comprising a plurality of heterogeneous elements, each affixed to a substrate and having means for non-conductively coupling signals to transmission lines or wires in the substrate.

Still other aspects of the invention relate to means for non-conductively signalling between electronic elements and the use of various dielectric, adhesive, elastomeric and other materials in combination therewith.

Yet another aspect of the invention relates to a method for increasing the manufacturing yield and reducing the cost of a modular electronic system by assembling high yield known-good units to form a modular system utilizing non-conductive interconnections and, if necessary, to repair or optimize the system by replacing selected elements.

Further aspects of the invention relate to methods for differentially signalling between elements in a modular system via non-conductive means, and to receiver and transmitter circuits for practicing such signalling methods.

According to a still further aspect of the invention, very high frequency signals are communicated between modules by transmission line coupling. Such coupling is preferably implemented with parallel or perpendicularly overlapping microstrip or stripline segments. Modular microwave and millimeter wave systems are preferably assembled to communicate via transmission line coupling.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE FIGURES

The above, as well as other, aspects of the invention are explained in the detailed description below, which describes the various preferred embodiments of the invention and is intended to be read in conjunction with the set of figures, in which:

FIG. 1 depicts an exemplary portion of one embodiment of a modular electronic system 1 in accordance with the invention;

FIG. 2 depicts an exemplary portion of a modular electronic system wherein a signal is differentially coupled from a pair of transmission lines on a substrate, across a pair of coupled half-capacitors, and to a pair of transmission lines on a die;

FIG. 3 is a partially exploded view of an exemplary portion of a modular electronic system which includes both capacitive and conductive interconnections between a die and a substrate;

FIG. 4 depicts an exemplary portion of an MCM constructed in accordance with the present invention;

FIG. 5 depicts an exemplary portion of an MCM similar to that of FIG. 4, but including a power substrate, distinct from the signal substrate, as well as a heat sink;

FIGS. 6A-D depict exemplary waveforms for a digital (or multi-state) signal capacitively coupled from a die to a substrate in accordance with the invention;

FIG. 7 depicts an exemplary portion of a modular electronic system in which a die capacitively interconnects ("bridges") two substrates;

FIG. 8 depicts an illustrative portion of a non-planar modular electronic system that includes multiple dies and substrates;

FIG. 9 depicts and exemplary portion of a large-scale modular system constructed in accordance with the invention which utilizes a so-called "leapfrog" geometry;

FIG. 10 depicts an illustrative portion of a "leapfrog" integrated system constructed entirely from dies;

FIGS. 11A-B depict the effect of misalignment between capacitor plates in a capacitively coupled modular system;

FIGS. 12A-B depict the use of an oversized half-capacitor plate to minimize the impact of misalignment in a capacitively coupled system;

FIG. 13 depicts a modular electronic system wherein a plurality of (optionally superconducting) electronic devices on implemented on a flexible substrate;

FIG. 14 depicts an illustrative portion of a large-scale, heterogeneously integrated modular electronic system constructed in accordance with the invention;

FIG. 15 depicts the use of a uniform capacitive interface to couple modules of varying sizes and packaging levels in accordance with the invention;

FIG. 16 depicts a modular system in which a plurality of modules capacitively couple to a backplane;

FIGS. 17A-B comparatively depict connection methods in accordance with the prior art and the present invention;

FIGS. 18A-C depict several steps in the assembly of an MCM (such as those of FIGS. 4-5) in accordance with the invention;

FIG. 19 depicts a capacitive signal path including means for adjusting overall gain;

FIGS. 20A-B depict an exemplary application specific module (ASM) constructed in accordance with the invention;

FIG. 21 depicts a cable interface utilizing the capacitive coupling techniques of the invention;

FIG. 22 depicts an exemplary portion of a module electronic system wherein a substrate provides both inter-chip and intra-chip capacitive signal paths;

FIG. 23A depicts an exemplary apparatus for testing modules constructed in accordance with the invention;

FIG. 23B depicts a wafer-scale modular system constructed in accordance with the present invention;

FIGS. 24-25 compare the fabrication of MCMs in the prior art (FIG. 24) and the fabrication of wafer-scale modules in accordance with the invention (FIG. 25);

FIG. 26 depicts the general flow of assembly, testing and rework of a wafer-scale or similar modular system in accordance with the present invention;

FIG. 27 shows the yield of good dies in a typical semiconductor fabrication process as a function die size;

FIG. 28 depicts several plots of system cost as a function of die size for an exemplary capacitively interconnected system;

FIG. 29 depicts the flow of a design cycle for a modular system constructed in accordance with the present invention;

FIG. 30 depicts a block diagram of an off-die capacitive signal path in accordance with the invention;

FIGS. 31A-B depict a final stage of a preferred embodiment of a transmitter;

FIG. 32 depicts a preferred embodiment of a switching means adapted to drive differential capacitive signal paths;

FIG. 33 depicts a simplified electrical model of the interface between an exemplary switching means and a terminated substrate transmission line;

FIG. 34 depicts a simplified electrical model of the interface between an exemplary switching means and an unterminated substrate wiring line;

FIG. 35 depicts a block diagram of a preferred, differential off-die signal path;

FIG. 36 is a schematic diagram of an exemplary single-ended receiver compatible for use in the signal path depicted in FIG. 30;

FIG. 37 is a schematic diagram of an exemplary differential receiver compatible for use in the signal path depicted in FIG. 35;

FIGS. 38A-B illustrate non-conductive signalling between modules by means of parallel and perpendicular coupled transmission lines.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION

Reference is now made to FIG. 1, which shows an exemplary portion of one embodiment of a modular electronic system 1 in accordance with the invention. As depicted, system 1 comprises a substrate 10, a die 11 and a means 13 for capacitively signalling, which provides a capacitive signal path between substrate 10 and die 11. Means 13 for capacitively signalling comprises two electromagnetically communicating regions illustratively depicted as "half-capacitors" 14 and 15. A dielectric 17 is preferably used to partly or totally fill the gap between half-capacitors 14 and 15. Dielectric 17 may be employed to increase the capacitance of capacitive signalling means 13, to provide passivation for die 11 or substrate 10, to enhance the thermal conductivity between die 11 and substrate 10, and/or to mechanically bond or support substrate 10 and die 11.

As depicted in FIG. 1, die 11 also illustratively includes a plurality of electronic devices 12, implemented on an active surface of the die, and a means for powering the die, shown as a conductive contact 16 on the surface of the die.

Die 11 is preferably a digital integrated circuit fabricated by a conventional, low cost process. System 1 preferably includes additional means for capacitively signalling and additional dies, as depicted in later Figures. For example, system 1
could comprise an MCM. In such a system, die 11 might be a CMOS silicon die with active components 12 fabricated on its surface, while the substrate 10 might be a die fabricated of GaAs.

As will be discussed at length below, use of capacitive signalling means 13 in such a system offers considerable advantages over conventional alternative approaches. Conventional approaches, such as packaging the dies independently and wiring them together conductively, or growing a crystal of one material on a region of the other, are significantly more expensive for comparable performance than comparable systems constructed in accordance with the present invention. Moreover, such conventional systems generally suffer low yields and low operational reliability, due to thermal expansion stresses.

Die 11 preferably includes one or more conductive contacts 16 for powering the devices 12. For a conventional silicon CMOS die 11, contact 16 illustratively is a metallic aluminum region fabricated lithographically on the silicon CMOS die. In some applications, it may be desirable to gold-plate the outer surface of the aluminum region to protect against corrosion. Illustratively, power could be delivered by means of a metallic fuzz button conductively connected to substrate 10 or to a different substrate. Fuzz button power connections, in combination with coupled half-capacitor signal connections 14 and 15, allow die 11 to be successively mounted and removed from substrate 10 non-destructively, which affords significant advantages in terms of testing, repair or performance optimization, as compared to destructive approaches. Such non-destructive mount/remove cycles entail substantially zero forces, torques, or changes in energy across the means 13 for capacitive signalling.

Substrate 10 is preferably constructed from a low dielectric factor material in order to facilitate high speed signalling. The substrate can be either passive or active. An example of a passive substrate is a printed wiring board wherein half-capacitor 15 would preferably comprise a lithographically defined copper region of substrate 10. An example of an active substrate is a collection of active and/or passive semiconductor devices and wiring. Typical active elements are set forth below.

Superconducting substrates are particularly well-suited to use coupled half-capacitors, due to the absence of any metallic contact between die 11 and the superconducting substrate 10. Materials problems which might otherwise arise in soldering or bonding to brittle high temperature superconducting ceramic layers are eliminated. All of the propagation advantages of superconducting transmission lines (especially low dispersion) are retained. While termination resistor fabrication is potentially challenging, this can be done with localized heating of a line above the transition temperature, or by application of sufficiently intense DC magnetic fields to force the superconductor normal in the resistive region. Such techniques may also provide a means for tuning the value of the termination resistance in a post-fabrication step by adjusting the current which heats or induces the magnetic field.

Illustratively, half-capacitors 14 and 15 comprise conductive plates. Die half-capacitor 14 may comprise an aluminum metal pad lithographically defined on a CMOS silicon integrated circuit 11. Adequate capacitance can be realized using the upper level of the integrated circuit die metalization to form half-capacitor 14, and a matching plate on a high density substrate 10 as the other half-capacitor 15.

Coupled half-capacitors can be formed in arrangements, like 13, which couple one-to-one, or alternatively in structures which couple one-to-many or many-to-many. The circuitry for sending and receiving signals via coupled half-capacitors can advantageously fit underneath or beside the corresponding half-capacitor; the plates themselves therefore need not be lithographed at the expense of usable chip real estate. Using present technology, the invention provides significant advantages in terms of the area required to implement high performance inter-die signalling circuits.

Coupled half-capacitors are preferably formed by affixing die 11 to substrate 10 such that half-capacitors 14 and 15 effectively overlap. Importantly, use of coupled half-capacitors instead of conventional chips first, soldered, or wire-bonded connections substantially relaxes the need for high precision alignment. Indeed, the size or shape of half-capacitors 14 and 15 need not be identical, and can be advantageously optimized to mitigate the effects of anticipated misalignments, such as those from manufacturing tolerances, assembly errors, or thermal mismatch.

Circuitry for coupled half-capacitors can cost substantially less chip real estate per bit than connections for conductively coupled off-die signalling. The driver and receiver circuits are small enough to be fabricated underneath the corresponding half-capacitor plate. The plates are smaller than contact pads and fan-out leads in the present art, and can overlay other active circuitry, including circuitry unrelated to I/O. Plates can be packed much more densely than pads, and can occupy any part of the surface of the die rather than predominantly the perimeter.

A coupled half-capacitor of approximately 1 picofarad can be realized with a plate 70 microns by 70 microns metalized on top of the die, assuming the dielectric factor of the separator is K=112 (TiO.sub.2 ceramic) and the plate separation is 3.5
microns. This represents an I/O surface density of approximately 10.sup.5 equivalent leads per square inch. Alternative dielectric materials, such as oriented barium titanate crystals which have a dielectric factor more than 100 times larger than titanium dioxide, may further increase the I/O density. However, once the half-capacitor plate size becomes smaller than the driver/receiver circuitry, and the die is circuit-limited rather than I/O pad-limited, there is little point in further reducing the size of the plate except in certain scenarios: where they comprise multiple platelet regions ganged together electrically and logically; where they are used for AC powering; or where other surface accessible functions like optical transmitters/detectors compete for surface space.

Standard semiconductor processes allow active circuitry to be implemented beneath a metal half-capacitor plate. In contrast, implementation of active circuitry beneath conductive contact pads is undesirable because mechanical forces imposed on the contact pad can irreversibly alter the electronic behavior of the underlying domain.

Half-capacitors 14 and 15 need not be constructed of the same material and can even be formed from chemically incompatible materials. The half-capacitors can be formed by any means from any uniform or composite material(s)--including metals, superconductors (including High T.sub.c), semi-conductors, semi-metals, impedance-varying or conductance-varying materials--in single or multiple layers or domains. They can be built in any state or form of matter--including gases, gasified material, liquids, liquified material, solids, solidified material, composite, slurry, gel, suspension, matrix, or others.

Since the conductance, or charge-carrying capability, of the half-capacitor plates is typically so high, the effective plate-to-plate overlap and separation, and the properties of dielectric 17, largely determine the performance of the coupled half-capacitors 13. Methods for forming capacitor plates are well-known in the microelectronics industry, although their application to MCMs and other modular interconnection schemes is not recognized in the prior art.

The inter-plate gap between half-capacitors 14 and 15 may be filled with a high dielectric material or left empty (with air or vacuum). Illustratively, the dielectric 17 is a high dielectric factor fluid, such as ethylene glycol. Dielectric 17
can be disposed between a series of passivation layers on each plate, if any, and intervening insulator, if any. Such passivation layers can be formed cheaply and reliably from oxides of the metalization layer and/or from applied emulsion coatings such as titanium dioxide, crystalline barium titanate oriented along the high-dielectric axis, and other materials which are well-known in the electrochemical community and commercially available.

The known corrosion properties, cleanliness, and viscosity as a function of temperature of the dielectric are crucial, as is its dielectric factor. Colloidal suspensions of high dielectric factor solids (e.g., ceramics like titanium dioxide applied in a slurry) can be used as the filler material, as well as a corrosion-free low dielectric factor liquid, such as the Fluorinerts. The dielectric may be an insulating liquid, such as, ethylene glycol, propylene glycol, glycerin, or nitrobenzene; a gas, such as uranium hexafluoride; or a mixed-phase suspension or gel, in order to exploit heat transport properties, cleanliness, or mechanical stability. The hygroscopic nature of these materials remains a major concern, and some (lower dielectric factor) hydrophobic materials, such as 1,1,1 trichloroethane may therefore be preferable. Hygroscopy and temperature-dependent sensitivity to vibration and to changes in viscosity or dielectric factor complicate implementation, but their treatment is well-known to those skilled in the art. Some processes for applying coatings also require a polishing step.

Liquid dielectrics may be useful in certain systems, in part because no sheer force is transmitted if the chips have to be moved, and in part because the dielectric is scratch proof. Spacers on the chip surface could assure constant separation in the presence of a high dielectric liquid like glycerol but are not required unless shorting is a risk. In the case of liquid dielectrics, surface tension may be sufficient to hold the die and substrate against one another.

Intervening insulator(s), if used, should generally slide on at least one side to accommodate thermal expansion, and may either be bonded to one of the dies, substrates or modules, as with an adhesive, or maintained as a monolithic material bonded to neither, such as Cellophane. Bonding to both surfaces should be avoided, except with liquid dielectrics, elastomers, or systems carefully engineered to accommodate thermal expansion.

Temperature and frequency dependence of the dielectric factor remain a significant engineering consideration. Nearly all known materials exhibit complicated frequency dependence on their dielectric factor, which can effectively limit their range of use in coupled half-capacitor gaps. Of course, dry air or a vacuum represent exceptions to this rule, but their low dielectric factor and compressibility make them less attractive.

In the MCM design community, high dielectric materials are shunned in general, since signals propagate through wiring at less than the speed of light by a factor of the square-root of the surrounding dielectric factor. (See, for example, Robert Johnson, Robert Teng, and John Balde, "Multichip Modules Systems Advantages, Major Constructions and Materials Technologies." IEEE Press, 1991.) Contrary to the teachings in the MCM community, high dielectric materials have a central role in the present invention.

One disadvantage with high dielectric materials, however, is that they cause the electric field to spread outside the region immediately between opposing half-capacitors, necessitating greater spreading out of the placement of neighboring plates. In this regard, lower dielectric material would allow tighter packing of neighbors, but at the cost of a commensurate increase in voltage or plate area, or a decrease in plate separation, with accompanying complexities. For a system with a uniform dielectric and a plate dimension much greater than the separation, neighboring plates can be packed with a separation approximately twice the vertical separation without encountering significant cross-talk problems. A patterned dielectric, with lowered dielectric factor outside of the gaps between opposing plates, would allow slightly tighter areal packing of plates, but increase the manufacturing complexity. Dielectrics may also be engineered to enable/disable capacitance above a threshold between paired half-capacitors. Extremely low cost processes from the painting/copying industry (e.g., lithography) are well-known for fabricating printed wiring boards, and can analogously be employed to implement the dielectric pattern, effectively defining interconnections.

While a pair of coupled half-capacitors represents the preferred means for capacitively signalling, other such means are available. For example, multi-storey capacitively coupled structures can be constructed wherein one or more intervening conductive regions are disposed (preferably in the dielectric region) between two terminal half-capacitors, thereby effectively forming a series connected chain of two or more capacitors. Importantly, such multi-layer structures do not require any overlap between the two terminal half-capacitors. For example, in a three-layer structure, overlap only between the bottom plate and a middle conductor and between the top plate and the middle conductor suffices to implement a means for capacitively signalling between the top and bottom plates. Printing/copying processes (e.g., xerography) may be applicable for forming such structures cheaply.

Reference is now made to FIG. 2, which depicts an exemplary portion of a modular electronic system wherein a signal is differentially coupled from a pair of transmission lines 32 and 33 on substrate 10, across a pair of coupled half-capacitors
13, to a pair of transmission lines 34 and 37 on die 10. A means for terminating transmission lines 32 and 33 is provided on substrate 10 by termination resistors 31b and 31c, connected to a ground plane by line 31a.

Advantageously, transmission lines 34 and 37 connect to on-die driver and/or receiver circuits, implemented as some of the active elements 12 of die 11. Transmission lines 32 and 33 may couple to driver or receiver circuits implemented on substrate 10, to other chips, modules or substrates via additional coupled half-capacitors, or to external conductive leads. Transmission lines 32 and 33 are preferably implemented as microstrip, stripline or slotline transmission lines. Of course, ordinary unterminated metal or polysilicon interconnect will suffice in certain applications.

Reference is now made to FIG. 3, which shows a partially exploded view of an exemplary portion of a modular electronic system which includes both capacitive and conductive interconnections between die 11 and substrate 10. Conductive contact pads
45, 46 and 47 illustratively receive power, ground and a plurality of I/O signals from substrate 10. Conductive connection is achieved by affixing die 11 to substrate 10 such that conductive connection means 4142 and 43 touch their respective contacts
45, 46 and 47. Importantly, this permits non-destructive removal of die 11 from substrate 10, thereby providing substantial fabrication, testing and repair advantages for modular systems based on the present invention.

Conductive connection means preferably comprise metallic fuzz buttons, such as the Cinapse(tm) contacts manufactured by Cinch, Inc. The holes in substrate 10 which accommodate metallic fuzz buttons 41, 42, 43 are preferably conically tapered to ensure that the buttons do not interfere with seating of die 11 against substrate 10. Alternative conductive means include solder balls, wiring on tape or films, bonded wires, contact probes, liquid metals such as mercury, low melting point metals such as gallium, and other high conductance media such as may be appropriate for particular engineering situations.

Advantageously, the conductive connections can be customized by impairing (e.g., removing, eroding or destroying) or adding selected fuzz-buttons, thereby disabling or enabling conductive connection between the selected fuzz-buttons and their respective contact pads.

Typically, the conductive connections 45, 46, 47 can be much larger than the capacitive couplings, since power feeds are rarer than signal feeds and benefit from the lessened resistance of bigger leads. Conductive contacts are however relatively very expensive and failure prone compared to coupled half-capacitors. It is therefore advantageous to employ the relatively coarse technology of conductive contacts only for DC power leads, while retaining the invention's advantages of many high bandwidth capacitively coupled paths for signalling.

Contact pads for fuzz buttons occupy 0.3 mm.sup.2 each in the preferred embodiment. In contrast, circuitry to drive the capacitive couplings occupies about 0.04 mm.sup.2 per half-capacitor, based on a 1 micron CMOS process. Multiply-redundant contact pads may advantageously compensate for the relatively low reliability of mechanical contacts.

Reference is now made to FIG. 4, which depicts an exemplary portion of an MCM constructed in accordance with the present. invention. The MCM comprises a substrate 10, a first die 11 and a second die 61. (First die 11 and second die 61 could also represent different parts of a single die.) A terminated transmission line 33 interconnects half-capacitors 15 and 65 on substrate 10, thereby providing a signal path between half-capacitor 14 on the first die 11 and half-capacitor 64 on the second die 61.

Transmission line 33 provides efficient communication between half-capacitors 65 and 15. Importantly, the power required to couple a signal from half-capacitor 64 (on second die 61) to half-capacitor 14 (on first die 11), via transmission line
33, is substantially independent of the length 51 of transmission line 33. For communications beyond a reasonably short distance, the off-die route (via transmission line 33) offers potentially superior performance to an equivalent on-die routing of the same signal. By contrast, in prior art MCMs based on conductive signal interconnections between die and substrate, the off-die coupling of signals via the substrate involves substantial performance penalties due to the excessive parasitic inductance of the conductive die/substrate connections. Transmission lines and unterminated wiring both, however, suffer limitations from the integrated net series resistance over a path and the present invention cannot avoid this problem unless a shorter wiring path can be achieved. Modem signal coding techniques such a those discussed below are useful in confining this problem to one of power attenuation rather than signal dispersion.

First die 11 and second die 61 also include conductive contact pads 52 for, among other things, receiving power from substrate 10.

Advantageously, dies 11 and 61 can be formed from different or incompatible materials. For example, first die 11 could comprise a low cost CMOS integrated circuit while second die 61 could comprise a GaAs integrated circuit, including optical I/O devices. The spacings 50 and 60 between the dies and substrate can be the same or different, as needed to accommodate the electronic or physical requirements of dies 11 and 61. Likewise, similar or different dielectrics 17 and 67 can be used in the half-capacitors that couple dies 11 and 61, respectively, to substrate 10.

The tolerance of the capacitive interconnections to thermal expansion represents an important advantage of the invention over conventional MCMs. Where dies 11 and 61 represent different portions of a large (e.g., wafer-scale) die, the misalignment errors due to thermal expansion mismatch accrue and can become particularly troublesome. In conductively coupled prior art MCMs, thermal expansion problems often require that the substrate material be selected to match, as closely as possible, the thermal expansion properties of a particular die material, typically silicon. In contrast, the present invention permits integration of heterogeneous dies or modules on a common substrate with substantially relaxed thermal expansion constraints, at least for dies of modest size. To increase the tolerance of the capacitive interconnection between die 61 and substrate 10 to misalignments and/or thermal expansions, half-capacitor 65 is advantageously sized larger than half-capacitor
64.

For large die size, matching the thermal expansion of the substrate 10 to the thermal expansion of the die becomes a major consideration. Sheer stresses will be induced in the dielectrics unless the large size die and the substrate can slide along their adjacent surfaces or have well matched coefficients of thermal expansion. In addition, unsupported standard wafers bow as much as 50 microns with a 70.degree. C. rise in temperature, suggesting a requirement for edge-to-edge thermal control to within a few degrees Celsiusi unless the mating of the substrate, the dielectric, and the large size die is compliant.

Reference is now made to FIG. 5, which depicts an exemplary portion of an MCM similar to that of FIG. 4, but including a power substrate 70, distinct from the signal substrate 10, as well as a heat sink 81.

Powers substrate 70 preferably includes a ground plane 74, power plane 75 and decoupling capacitance 79 coupling therebetween. A plurality of terminals represented as elements 76, 77 and 78 on power substrate 70 are conductively connected to respective terminals on die 11 and provide ground, power and a plurality of external I/O leads, respectively, to die 11.

Ground plane 74, power plane 75 and the power/ground wiring associated therewith are preferably fabricated using a low resolution lithographic process. Power substrate 70 might alternatively be formed from materials, such as metals, ceramics, organic polymers, silicon, inorganic polymers, glasses, amorphous solids, crystalline solids, polycrystalline solids, composite materials, heterogeneous multilayer materials, or others. Power substrate 70 may be made of rigid or flexible material, depending upon the application, and may include holes or similar patterned features to accommodate, for example, an external optical I/O path 83 from/to an optical I/O device 82 on chip 85. Advantageously, external power, ground and I/O terminals 71, 72
and 73 on power substrate 70 can be wire-bonded to appropriately configured pins or other external leads, thereby providing a conventional Level 1, 11/2, 2, or 3 package lead-out as appropriate.

The conductive connections between terminals 71, 72 and 73 on power substrate 70 and similar terminals on chip 11 can be fabricated by reflow-solder, liquid metal or other conductor, metallic fuzz buttons, pin & socket, other mechanically compliant reversible or irreversible contacts, or by wire-bond or other welding techniques.

Alternatively, power could be provided to die 11 or other dies using integrated batteries or high frequency alternating current instead of direct current, thereby dispensing with any requirement for conductively coupled contact points altogether. Use of optical or near-optical frequencies to couple power is preferable since it increases transmission efficiency, and polarizing the radiation decreases crosstalk interference with other signal interconnections, notably including on-chip circuitry. Advantageously, essentially all of a die's surface, except that employed for I/O (e.g., signal coupling half-capacitors, semiconductor lasers, photodetectors and the like), can be used to receive power.

FIG. 5 also depicts a means for dissipating heat from dies 11 and 85 comprising a heat sink 81 and a thermal elastomer 80 positioned between heat sink 81 and dies 11 and 85. Thermal elastomer 80 preferably comprises a material having high thermal conductivity, such as organic elastomers filled with boron nitride. Alternatively, other known methods for effecting good thermal contact between dies 11 and 85 and heat sink 81 can be used, including maintaining the dies and heat sink in intimate physical contact, employing thermally conductive greases or epoxies, soldering or eutectic bonding of the heat sink and dies, and the like.

It ordinarily does not matter whether the thermal elastomer is an electrical insulator or conductor, unless dies operating at different bulk potentials share the same heat sink. But for this or other reasons an electrical insulator may be preferred. Ceramic loaded elastomers containing aluminum oxide or (preferably) boron nitride are one such approach.

Heat sink 81 can be cooled with any standard cooling technique, including conductive, convective, or radiative transfer, or by phase change of a suitable material, as in a heat pipe.

Preferably, heat sink 81 also comprises a pressure plate 84. Force 84 applied through pressure plate 81 assures intimate contact between dies 11 and 85 and substrates 10 and 70, as well as dies 11 and 85 and heat sink 81. Positioning the dies and substrates relative to one another by means of pressure offers important advantages with respect to building and unbuilding the MCM assembly reversibly (e.g., for repair, inspection, testing, performance enhancement, and so forth). Advantageously, use of a reformable elastomer 80 further contributes to these reversibility advantages.

If two distinct substrates 10 and 70 are used to carry wiring and power, thermal expansion should be matched. However, this constraint is no different from that faced in conventional MCM designs, which commonly employ distinct power and signal substrates. Accordingly, appropriate techniques for matching or compensating for the thermal expansions of substrates 10 and 70 are known to those ordinarily skilled in the art.

Construction of the interconnects on signal substrate 10 is extremely rapid and amenable to mass production. The signal lines in substrate 10 may advantageously be fabricated as microstrips, striplines or slotlines. In general, more layers will be required on substrate 10 as the size of substrate 10 (and the number of or size of die(s)) grows to compensate for the typical geometric increase in wire density. Advantageously, the superior electrical characteristics of the lithographically formed transmission lines on substrate 10 allows use of longer-than-minimal routing paths in order to relieve layout wiring congestion. Assuming that the resistors terminating a transmission line are lithographically fabricated, the cost of manufacturing substrate 10 is approximately linear as a function of area or at worst is a slowly growing geometric function. Importantly, the manufacturing cost is not proportional to the number of signal interconnections between substrate and die(s), as is the case for the many conventional contact junctions needed for conductive signalling. The cost of the remaining components--power substrate 70, heat sink 81, pressure plate 84, and thermal elastomer layer 80--scale approximately linearly with area, also independent of the number of die/substrate signal interconnections.

FIG. 5 also shows two exemplary passivation layer configurations for dies 11 and 85. Passivation layer 86 (covering die 11) and layer 87 (covering die 85) are preferably thin, protective layers of silicon dioxide, silicon nitride, polyimide, borosilicate glass or similar materials. Illustratively, passivation layer 87 covers the entire active surface of die 85, while passivation layer 86 is patterned and does not cover half-capacitor plate 14. Common passivation materials have significantly lower dielectric factors than many of the materials contemplated for use in the preferred embodiment of dielectric 17. Accordingly, the passivation materials preferably should not be used on the half-capacitor plates and, if used, should have as high dielectric factors as practical.

Passivation layer 86 is patterned by lithographically defining regions of the passivation layer to be removed during the chip fabrication process, then selectively removing such regions. Advantageously, the lithographically defined region can be smaller than the half-capacitor plate, so as to provide a border region surrounding the half-capacitor wherein the passivation layer partially overlaps the plate. With only a portion of the half-capacitor plate 14 exposed without passivation, the influx of chemical contaminants is effectively discouraged.

In contrast, passivation layer 87 covers half-capacitor plate 64. This approach typically reduces the available capacitance of the coupled half-capacitors, but eliminates possible contamination problems at the exposed plate boundary.

In either passivation layer configuration, the conductive contacts 52 will be unpassivated, as in current fabrication technologies. Advantageously, noble metal contacts may be useful for avoiding oxidation or corrosion.

FIG. 5 also illustrates why manufacturing and construction of a modular system in accordance with the invention is simpler than current techniques for forming a modular system with a comparable number of signal interconnections and similar density. The exemplary fabrication of half-capacitor plates and passivation layers employs standard semiconductor fabrication techniques, and the dielectric can itself be the adhesive holding the modular system together, while the heat sink and thermal elastomer are largely standard components. Similarly, the substrate (and power substrate, if employed) can be easily mass-produced with current techniques. While some changes will be required in the CAD layout tools, the flexibility to locate half-capacitor interconnect plates directly above other signal lines on the dies simplifies the layout problem.

Reliability of the interconnects is extremely high if the FIG. 5 embodiment is employed. Fuzz buttons are comparable to pressed gold wires and TAB in assuring reliable electrical contact, although neither is as mechanically robust as solder or a lithographed metal junction. Fuzz buttons are at present, however, the easiest and most reliable of those conductive contact means to handle through repair/replacement cycles. The plurality of means for capacitively signalling avoids, by design, significant amounts of thermally induced sheer stress, assuming the dielectric is properly selected. In any case, the heat stress and forces perpendicular to the surface will likely be significantly lower than in conventional modular systems in which conductive bonds are pushed or soldered together.

Using capacitive couplings for signalling means that many fewer conductive contacts are needed (e.g., only for power, ground, or off-module I/O). Therefore, the Poisson statistics for anticipating failure need only account for a fraction of the number of mechanical components, as compared to conductively coupled signalling systems. Generally, important failure modes in MCM-level modular systems include solder deformities, electromigration, and metal-metal corrosion. Typical processes for assembling MCMs involve repeated installation and removal of dies from the module. During these steps, failure modes associated with the conductive connections to dies represent the dominant factor diminishing the yield or reliability of the manufacturing process. Such yield loss correlates strongly with the number of conductive connections. Therefore, the present invention, which employs dramatically fewer conductive connections than conventional MCM technologies, enjoys considerable advantages in terms of manufacturing/assembling yield, reliability, reparability and cost. These simplifications also benefit the design and operating cycles.

Reference is now made to FIGS. 6A-D, which depict exemplary waveforms for a 3-state digital signal coupled from die 11 to die 85 of FIG. 5 and appropriately supported by 3-state logic.

FIG. 6A shows a typical digital waveform in a high speed digital system. The waveform consists of a series of states, the states being defined by the level of the waveform during a particular clock period 29. For example, during period 21, the waveform represents a digital "1". In period 22, it represents a digital "0". In the case of a 3-state system, the waveform during period 23 represents a state designated "-1". The waveform is generated by a digital circuit constructed from devices 12
on die 11.

Before transmission across capacitative signalling means 13, a transmitter circuit on die 11 converts the digital waveform of FIG. 6A into a pulsed waveform as depicted in FIG. 6B. Note that in this example, the 3-state transmitter suppresses the trailing edge transition, which a 2-state (binary) transmitter advantageously would not bother doing. The exemplary pulsed waveform generated by the transmitter includes a pulse 24 representing the logic state during a particular portion of the clock period. The pulsed waveform is applied to half-capacitor 14, from which it travels to half-capacitor 64 by way of a first half-capacitor 15, terminated transmission line 33, and second half-capacitor 65 on substrate 10.

FIG. 6C shows the pulsed waveform received on half-capacitor 64, lagged in time due to the finite speed of transmission over the electrical distance from half-capacitor 14, and attenuated by the non-zero series impedance of the electrical path. At high speeds, the transmission of pulsed waveforms between half-capacitor plates 14 and 64 achieves much better signal-to-noise ratio than would a conventional conductive interconnection operating at the same power.

The signal received by half-capacitor 64 is coupled to a receiver circuit on die 85. This receiver circuit generates the digital output signal depicted in FIG. 6D. Note that in this example, the 3-state receiver has timing circuitry or access to a clock signal, so can discern and restore "0" states 22 as well as the trailing edges suppressed by the transmitter. As is apparent, the waveform of FIG. 6D represents a delayed and restored version of the original digital input waveform depicted in FIG. 6A.

The waveforms shown in FIGS. 6A-D are merely exemplary. A myriad of signalling schemes are possible, many of which are preferred over the simple, un-encoded, 3-state single-ended scheme depicted in FIGS. 6A-D. In particular, differential binary signalling offers significant advantages in terms of noise immunity.

The signalling across coupled half-capacitors need not utilize the pulsed digital mode depicted in FIGS. 6A-D, but can instead employ any modulation of some combination of phase, frequency, amplitude and/or signal-to-noise ratio. The signals can have any form that does not require coupling of the DC component across the coupled half-capacitor. The signals may comprise binary or multistate codings, and, in the case of a ganged half-capacitor junction, may represent a multibit encoding encompassing the signals from one or more half-capacitors as channels.

The presently preferred embodiment employs pulses, each representing a bit, which are sent across a "differential pair" of coupled half-capacitor junctions. This is essentially a binary differential version of the technique illustrated in FIGS.
6A-D. Many of the telecommunication industry's techniques for communicating digital information over bandwidth-limited communication links have no DC component, and thus are advantageous in connection with the present invention. Notable such methods include alternate mark inverse and 10B8 codes. In addition, any coding scheme based on (approximately) constant numbers of zero & one bits, such as Knuth's methods, will have particularly advantageous signal-to-noise properties for a given power budget. Modem techniques designed for limited bandwidth environments, including frequency key shifting, phase encoding, and amplitude coding, are also useful as are hybrid coding schemes, such as QPSK. Multidimensional sphere packing, Reed-Solomon codes, Trellis codes, or other algorithms for coding states across one or more signal channels can be used to maximize inter-chip signalling bandwidth, up to the Shannon limit for the system, which may be higher than the clock rate. Of special interest is the class of coding schemes with limited bandwidth, since they can be used to transmit signals through exponentially tapered stripline transmission line transformers, allowing the matching of signals with high voltage swing but low current to low impedance transmission lines as part of the coupled half-capacitor. Limiting the bandwidth can advantageously avoid difficulties arising from dispersive lines. Major causes of such dispersion include the frequency-dependence of the line's dielectric factor, frequency dependent dielectric losses, skin effect and losses from the source resistance.

Reference is now made to FIG. 7, which depicts an exemplary portion of a modular electronic system in which a die bridges two substrates. Bridging die 89 includes at least two half-capacitors 14a-b, each of which couples to half-capacitors 15a-b on different substrates 10a-b via dielectrics 17a-b. Bridging die 89 preferably includes a plurality of active electronic devices implemented on an active surface 12 thereof. Substrates 10a and 10b may be of similar or dissimilar construction. Likewise, half-capacitors 14a-b and 15a-b are advantageously sized to accommodate anticipated thermal expansion and/or mechanical misalignment.

Either a passive or active signal path on bridging die 89 connects half-capacitors 14a and 14b. Advantageously, an active signal path may be used to convert between incompatible signal waveforms, timings and/or codings on substrates 10a and 10b.

Bridging die 89 preferably comprises a part of a very large system wherein a multiplicity of substrates are tied together with bridging modules, in this example a die. Systems formed from a multiplicity of substrates bearing microelectronic devices and/or wiring need not be primarily planar like those depicted in FIGS. 5 and 7, and can be extremely large: Barn Door Scale Integration is possible using the invention. FIGS. 9, 10, and 13 extend the teaching to exemplary extensible non-planar and planar arrangements.

Buckling modes may arise at the edges overlapped by bridging modules, particularly in vibration-rich environments. Such bending or expansion modes may effectively limit the diameter of buildable systems. Fortunately, these issues are well-understood by practitioners, and can be ameliorated in the preferred embodiment by a combination of compliant, mechanically damping dielectric or mounting materials, and use of compensatingly larger half-capacitors and circuit thresholds near the affected regions.

Reference is now made to FIG. 8, which depicts an illustrative portion of a modular electronic system that includes multiple dies 11, 92, 95 and substrates 10, 90, 93. In FIG. 8, die 11 is capacitively coupled to substrate 10. Note that the multi-storey structure of the capacitive signal path coupling chip 11 to substrate 10 (by way of conductor 14y, illustratively depicted as having been fabricated monolithically amidst dielectrics 17x and 17y) creates an "effective overlap" between half-capacitors 14x and 15x, which are not "substantially overlapped" plates. Substantially overlapped half-capacitors, such as 94a and 15, are effectively overlapped ipso facto.

Substrate 10 is also capacitively coupled to substrate 90. Within substrate 90, wiring 91 connects a plurality of half-capacitors 94a to a plurality of half-capacitors 94b, thereby providing an AC signal path between substrate 10 and substrate
93 and between substrate 10 and die 92. Substrate 93 also connects conductively to die 95 via a plurality of conductive leads 97, bonded to a plurality of conductive pads 96 on substrate 93.

Illustratively, substrate 10 may comprise a printed wiring board, while substrate 90 may comprise a multilayer ceramic substrate. Substrate 93 may be encapsulated within a plastic carrier package 98, which package also advantageously encapsulates die 95. Modules 92 and 11 may represent separate dies or different portions of the same die or wafer.

Those ordinarily skilled in the art will recognize numerous alternative arrangements of single or multiple dies coupled to or between single or multiple substrates by means of the invention. Such alternative arrangements are advantageously selected to accommodate particular physical, mechanical, electrical, thermal, and economic constraints of a particular system application. The distribution and costs of all components--on dies or substrates, as higher level modules of them, the thermal and environmental systems, the mechanical chassis, and so forth--can be considered in the overall system-wide Level 0-4 package optimization. For example, a substrate bearing capacitive contacts at right angles to the interconnection orientation may facilitate construction of Level 3 packages akin to backplanes or card cages, as in FIG. 16, and the given form factor may therefore influence the choice of circuitry in detail and assignment of circuits to modules. Flexible or articulated substrates may be used to further extend the number of feasible physical arrangements. Abutting or partially overlapping substrates may be used to couple signals, clocks, etc. throughout a large system, as in FIGS. 9-10. Using means for capacitive coupling to link regions bearing powered microelectronic devices to others or to substrates bearing wiring, numerous alternative regular or irregular topologies follow obviously from the present invention, including tilings, lattices, or cluster configurations. Arrangements of organized congregations of such regions, such as modular ensembles of dies and/or substrates, likewise follow directly from the invention. To the extent that such alternative system arrangements employ various claimed aspects of the invention, such arrangements shall be considered within the scope of the present invention.

Reference is now made to FIG. 9, which depicts an exemplary portion of a large-scale modular system constructed in accordance with the invention. FIG. 9 illustrates a so-called "leapfrog" geometry: Signals "leap" from a first module to a second via a bridging module which partially overlaps the first and second modules. Using this leapfrog assembly technique, large-scale systems can be constructed very economically.

In FIG. 9, a portion of die 115 overlaps substrate 123 such that half-capacitors 111 and 113 align to provide a capacitive signal path between substrate 123 and die 115. The leapfrog arrangement continues with substrate 124, which partially overlaps and capacitively couples to die 115 via coupled half-capacitors 125 and 116. Similarly, substrate 140 partially overlaps and capacitively couples with substrate 124, thus extending the leapfrog configuration. Advantageously, the leapfrog technique can also be used to distribute power from one die/substrate to the next through, for example, the previously mentioned fuzz-button connections.

Also depicted in FIG. 9 is a non-bridging die 119 (not part of the leapfrog arrangement) having a plurality of active devices and coupled to substrate 124 via a plurality of coupled half-capacitors 117. Similarly, non-bridging die 136
illustratively employs an off-die signal path (in substrate 140) to couple circuits on active surface 138 proximate to half-capacitors 133 and 135.

Several advantages of the leapfrog geometry are worth noting. First, the negative effects of thermal expansion are greatly reduced as compared, for example, to a similarly sized system in which a single substrate and die mate. Thus, if die 115
runs very hot and causes a slight misalignment of half-capacitors 116 and 125, the alignment of half-capacitors 117 and 128 and half-capacitors 120 and 130 will remain largely unaffected.

Another advantage of the leapfrog configuration is its easy reparability. The top level modules 123, 124 and 136 can be individually replaced, if defective, without further disassembly of the system. Even replacement of the bottom modules 115,
119 and 140 requires relatively little disassembly in a system having a large number of modules.

Still another advantage of the leapfrog configuration is the high performance of its inter-die connections. As previously noted, coupled half-capacitors (or coupled transmission lines) have lower parasitic inductance than similarly sized conductive connections. Additionally, since the modules in the leapfrog configuration overlap, the lengths of signal paths will be shorter than, for example, conventional technologies which utilize peripherally distributed pins, such as PC boards or MCMs with surface mounted dies. The combination of shorter signal paths and lower parasitic inductances can lead to a substantial increase in overall system performance.

The leapfrog configuration can also be denser than conventional planar packaging techniques. Therefore, clock skew problems are significantly mitigated. Advantageously, a clock signal can be broadcast, preferably from a centrally located module in a leapfrog integrated system, via a plurality of clock distribution paths, each of which comprises one or more transmission line segments linked by coupled half-capacitors. Such clock distribution paths preferably do not include restoring logic (e.g., transmitter and/or receiver circuits) and thus avoid introducing unnecessary gate delays into the clock signal.

In conventional MCM systems, great effort is expended to reduce the dielectric factor of the substrate material, since the speed of signal propagation scales inversely with the square root of the dielectric factor. Advantageously, the leapfrog configuration of the present invention reduces the lengths of signal paths, which provides a linear improvement in signal propagation time. Accordingly, low latency can be achieved using the invention without need for exotic, low dielectric factor substrates.

A further advantage of the leapfrog configuration is that it enables integration of heterogeneous, incompatible modules. The voltage levels, materials, etc. can be different among semiconductor die 115, die 119, and die 136, thereby permitting a system designer to exploit the particular advantages of various technologies within a densely integrated system. Likewise, the properties of substrates 123, 124 and 140 can be selected to enhance performance, reliability, reparability, cost, and other factors. For example, die 115 might be consumer-grade silicon CMOS, die 119 might bear microelectronic devices on diamond, and die 136 might be a high-temperature superconducting material bearing Josephson Junctions, while substrate 123 might be a laminate material such as FR4, substrate 124 might be an active substrate formed with a thin-film such as lines lithographed onto a chips-first plane, and substrate 140 might be a thick-film fabricated xerographically.

The cheapness of interconnect and amenability to heterogeneous integration means that small dies or modules may be used to support partial or specialized functions. Conventional technology, in contrast, generally attempts to bundle multiple functional subsystems into large-scale integrated circuits due to the cost of off-die signalling, often compounding manufacturing costs and sacrificing performance (due to use of suboptimal technologies for particular components, e.g., analog, etc.). Some important examples of components which a capacitively coupled multichip system might carry include logic devices (e.g., Field Programmable Logic Arrays), (field-programmable) gate arrays, processors, arithmetic units, bitwise manipulation units (e.g., cellular automata), permutation units, interconnection networks, memory, nanomechanical actuators, sensors, arrays of fractional analog or digital components (e.g., resistors of various sizes), or others.

Reference is now made to FIG. 10, which depicts an illustrative portion of a leapfrog integrated system constructed entirely from dies. Advantageously, replacement of substrates 123, 124 and 140 (of FIG. 9) with dies 163, 164 and 180 permits denser integration of logic and other circuits, as well as perfect matching of thermal coefficients of expansion. Otherwise, the properties and advantages of the FIG. 10 die-die-die leapfrog configuration are analogous to those of the FIG. 9
die-substrate-die leapfrog assembly or FIG. 7 substrate-die-substrate assembly, and therefore need not be reiterated. Power is advantageously delivered through the interstices between dies in such a system, rather than through either perforations or diffused contacts through dies, and may advantageously employ a dedicated power substrate and pressure plate.

Reference is now made to FIGS. 11a-b, which depict the effect of misalignment between capacitor plates in a capacitively coupled modular system. FIG. 11a shows a portion of a capacitively coupled system wherein dies 251, 252, 253 and 254 are perfectly aligned so as to define overlapping regions 255, 256 and 257 identical to the size of the half-capacitor plates. In this idealized configuration, capacitive signal coupling is maximized and unwanted crosstalk is minimized.

FIG. 11b shows the same portion wherein die 252 (of FIG. 11a) has been replaced by a misaligned die 262. The misalignment of die 262 decreases the area of regions 265 and 256 which represent overlap of the misaligned die's half-capacitors. Therefore, the magnitude of the signal coupled between die 262 and dies 251 and 253 will diminish; crosstalk between die 262's half-capacitors and other proximate conductive signal lines or half-capacitors may increase as well. Importantly, however, the misalignment of die 262 does not affect the coupling or alignment between other dies not directly coupled to 262, for example, die 254.

If misalignment of particular dies can be anticipated (e.g., the dies run very h