The performance choice: a study of chip and package densities

Abstract

A large circuit partition has been packaged using both single-chip modules (SCM) and multichip modules (MCM). It is shown that the use of closely packed chips on an MCM can readily offset the perceived advantages of large chips with high circuit counts when they are coarsely packed using SCMs on a printed circuit board (PCB). it is demonstrated that, since circuit accessibility monotonically increases with chip capacity and MCM is always better than SCM, the best packaged electronics technology would be made up of largest possible chip capacities on an MCM package. The only caution is that the chip size should not get so large that the MCM chip packing density suffers too much. Also, it is important that the MCM and chip site count be large enough to allow all the cycle time setting paths to be placed on one MCM for this analysis to be valid. >