System-in-Package: Electrical and Layout Perspectives

The unquenched thirst for higher levels of electronic systems integration and higher performance goals has produced a plethora of design and business challenges that are threatening the success enjoyed so far as modeled by Moore's law. To tackle these challenges and meet the design needs of consumer electronics products such as those of cell phones, audio/video players, digital cameras that are composed of a number of different technologies, vertical system integration has emerged as a required technology to reduce the system board space and height in addition to the overall time-to-market and design cost. System-in-package (SiP) is a system integration technology that achieves the aforementioned needs in a scalable and cost-effective way, where multiple dies, passive components, and discrete devices are assembled, often vertically, in a package. This paper surveys the electrical and layout perspectives of SiP. It first introduces package technologies, and then presents SiP design flow and design exploration. Finally, the paper discusses details of beyond-die signal and power integrity and physical implementation such as I/O (input/output cell) placement and routing for redistribution layer, escape, and substrate.