Thermal investigation of silicon and glass interposer-based microelectronic systems

Abstract

Interposer-based systems or 2.5 D ICs have attracted attention over the past few years. An interposer-based system is a large silicon substrate that carries several chips on the surface. Glass is also considered as an option as a substrate instead of silicon because of several advantages. In this paper, temperature distributions within the interposer-based system with silicon and glass substrates have been studied numerically and the effect of different design parameters, such as the distance between chips and the distance of every chip from the substrate edges, on temperature field have been investigated. The results from the numerical simulation show that temperature rise in an interposer-based system with glass substrate is higher than the temperature rise in the interposer-based system with silicon substrate. The distance between chips is an important parameter on the temperature distribution with silicon substrate, however, it does not have a significant effect on the temperature rise in a system with glass substrate. Also, the minimum distance between silicon chips to maintain thermal insulation between chips in a glass interposer-based system for different amounts of dissipating chip power has been found. In addition, the influence of inter-die thermal resistance between chips and substrate has been investigated and the results show that temperature rise in the substrate increases as the inter-die thermal resistance increases for both silicon and glass substrates. The results from this study can be helpful for the thermal design of interposer-based systems with silicon and glass substrates.