Redistribution layer routing for integrated fan-out wafer-level chip-scale packages

Abstract

The integrated fan-out (InFO) wafer-level chip-scale package (WLCSP) is an emerging packaging technology, which typically consists of multiple redistribution layers (RDLs) for signal redistributions among multiple chips. There is still no published work specifically on the RDL routing for the InFO WLCSP. Published RDL routing works consider different types of routing, namely free-assignment, pre-assignment, and unified-assignment routing, for a single chip. With the integration of multiple chips under the InFO WLCSP, however, previous works cannot achieve high efficiency or effectiveness with simple extensions. To remedy the deficiencies of poor interactions between chips and multiple RDLs, we formulate a new RDL routing problem for the InFO WLCSP and present the first work in the literature to handle the unified-assignment, multi-layer multi-chip RDL routing problem (without RDL vias), considering signal integrity, layer assignment, layer number minimization, and total wirelength minimization. We propose a concentric-circle model which models all the connections among one chip and all other chips. Based on this model, we assign the connections between chips to appropriate layers to avoid long detours. In addition, this model transforms the geometrical information of the pre-assignment connections among chips into a network-flow model to generate a routing prototype in a fan-out region not covered by any chip efficiently and effectively. Experimental results demonstrate the high quality and efficiency of our algorithm.