PCB‐design follows IC‐packaging

The evolution of IC manufacturing technology has led to a decrease in feature size on the silicon die from around 2μm nowadays down to 0.18μm, and in the near future down to 0.13μm. This implies a simultaneous decrease in the distance of the individual contact pads (pitch), decreasing from a moderate 0.5mm to nowadays 0.1mm or even 0.07mm for leading edge ICs. The near future will not allow this trend to continue. Instead of peripheral contacts, several rows of contacts or even use of the entire die area to accommodate the contacts will allow the numbers of IOs to increase to the required value. Following the roadmap of electronic devices the PCB has its design continuously changed. Accordingly we need today PCBs with high density interconnects, realized by sequential build‐up technology (SBU) including microvias. We see at the end of the next decade that the semiconductor technology will be introduced at the PCB level. At this time we are also able to transfer the chip design into the PCB directly. This dependence of the development from chip‐ and PCB‐technology is the subject of the paper.