CRII: SHF: Design, Extraction, and Optimization of Multi-Chip Fan-Out Wafer-Level-Packaging for Low-Power Heterogeneous Systems

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With the slowing down of Moore's Law, it is challenging to integrate more transistors and features into a single chip. New system- and package-level techniques are critical for emerging mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) applications with a strong emphasis on power and cost. This research aims to develop the key models and Computer-Aided Design (CAD) tools to enable integrating various heterogeneous components into a single Fanout Wafer-Level Package. It will address the major challenge of maintaining signal integrity and electro-thermal reliability in a powerful, yet compact, system with multiple Integrated Circuits (ICs) closely packed together to improve energy and cost efficiency. Moreover, a graduate course on CAD and physical design will be offered at the University of Arkansas. The developed CAD framework will be open-sourced and publicly available to further stimulate the advancement in chip-package co-design tool flow and commercialization. With heterogeneous components tightly integrated, new parasitics, resulting from both electrical- and magnetic-coupling, require both IC and package designers to work together closely on circuit and physical design. The proposed CAD framework blurs the boundaries between chip and package layouts in the design flow and extracts major coupling elements between them. It integrates chip-package co-design techniques into the entire VLSI design flow with time-efficient computational models so that signal integrity issues can be captured and addressed early to avoid a time-consuming trial-and-error design process. All parasitic components such as coupling capacitance and mutual inductance are included to ensure accurate timing and noise analyses. The new modeling methods, CAD algorithms and flows, and optimization techniques address the principle motivation behind more-than-Moore technologies and move toward high-density and energy-efficient heterogeneous systems.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.