MCM design for manufacturability

Abstract

The MCM industry is lacking many of the standards and defined processes necessary for creating effective design systems. Improving these design systems is critical to the industry's ability to rapidly launch manufacturable products into the market. Significant efforts must be made to overcome major shortcomings in industry infrastructure, concurrent engineering, expertise, and design tools. MCM design requires many elements of both integrated circuit (IC) and printed circuit board (PCB) design. The combination of industry standards and well developed processes has resulted in excellent design systems for developing highly manufacturable products in a timely manner. The current state of MCM design is assessed using the IC design process as a model. Significant industry investment has yielded enormous gains in IC design productivity, time-to-market, and functional costs. The multichip module industry can benefit from similar approaches. The paper gives detailed examples of specific issues concerning modeling components, substrates, and assemblies. Examples of systems for obtaining die data, substrate design rules, and assembly design rules are shown. These examples are from work performed by numerous organizations and are summarized with a snapshot of work on a portable Pentium(R)-based MCM. The results of developing improved MCM design systems will be significant: better products built at lower cost and brought to market quickly.