Whilst process node technologies and Moore’s Law are slowing down, manufacturers and chip designers are looking to new creative solutions to further enable device and performance scaling. Advanced packaging technologies are one such area where we’ve seen tremendous innovations over the past few years, such as the introduction of silicon interposers and integration of HBM-memory or the shift towards modularisation through chiplet designs.

Silicon interposers pose cost challenges as they are expensive and require quite a large silicon footprint, whilst chiplet designs which use conventional packaging on organic substrates are limited by I/O bandwidth and power efficiency. A solution to this problem has been the industry’s introduction of intermediary silicon dies that connect two logic chips together – but only in a limited scope, not using the same footprint as a full silicon interposer. Intel’s EMIB (Embedded Die Interconnect Bridge) has been the recently most talked about implementation of such technology.

Today as TSMC’s 2020 Technology Symposium, the Taiwanese manufacturer is detailing their own variant of such a technology, called Local Si Interconnect (LSI), that will be offered for both InFO and CoWoS packaging technologies in the form of InFO-L and CoWoS-L.

The new advancements are part of what TSMC now dubs its 3DFabric packaging technology platform which offers a versatile repertoire of integration and packaging options, which include SoIC, InFO, and CoWoS.

A brief explanation for our readers unfamiliar with the terms, SoIC (System on Integrated Chip) is TSMC’s bump-less chip stacking and hybrid bonding integration technology that allows for stacking multiple chip dies together, enabling extremely high-bandwidth and low power bonding between the silicon dies. Currently, this technology has no equal in the industry.

InFO is TSMC’s fan-out packaging technology, where a silicon die from a wafer is picked out and placed on a carrier wafer, upon which the further bigger structures such as the copper RDL (Redistribution layer), and later the carrier substrate is built upon.

TSMC’s variant of InFO with integration of an LSI is called InFO-L or InFO-LSI, and follows a similar structure with the new addition of it integrating this new local silicon interconnect intermediary chip for communication between two chips.

TSMC’s CoWoS (Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate) was originally described as the company’s silicon interposer 2.5D packaging technology, which is currently still falls under the CoWoS-S specifier, but meanwhile it also covers other chip-last packaging technologies. As the description hits it at, here the base substrate, RDL are built first, and only as the last step is the target silicon chip bonded to the package.

CoWoS-L is the new variant of TSMC’s chip-last packaging technology which adds in the Local Si Interconnect which is used in combination of a copper RDL to achieve higher bandwidth than just an RDL packaging implementation (CoWoS-R), and be more cost-effective than a full silicon interposer implementation (CoWoS-S).

TSMC describes the LSI as being either an active, or a passive chip, depending on chip designers needs and their cost sensitivities. The foundry expects to complete InFO-L qualification in Q1’21, and CoWoS-L is undergoing pre-qualification right now. Silicon bridge interconnect technologies such as LSI and EMIB are expected to bring high-performance chip designs at a lower cost for the designer and the consumer.

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