SAN JOSE – A new SEMI white paper details the rapid progress of 3-D IC integration technology, including through-silicon via developments.

TSV has been one of the most rapidly developing technologies in the semiconductor industry and promises a fundamental shift for the continued role of Moore’s Law and current multichip integration and packaging approaches, says 3D Integration: An Industry Progress Report. The white paper is intended to provide a snapshot of the rapidly developing technology and insights on critical barriers to overcome.

While current integration schemes such as wire bond and flip chip have been in production for some time, the next-generation of 3-D integration proposes to incorporate TSV as the primary method of interconnect. The drivers for the widespread adoption of TSVs are increased performance, reduced form factor, and cost reduction. Additionally, achieving true heterogeneous integration at the local level will require a high-density TSV solution and development efforts are rapidly occurring by numerous organizations around the world.

“Few technology areas are progressing as rapidly as TSV and few with such widespread impact on consumer and industrial electronics,” said Karl Stuber, senior director of assembly and test at SEMI. “While various conferences and industry news reporting have been helpful in covering recent developments, SEMI members believed a white paper summarizing the current TSV industry-wide development progress was important to enable a more effective industry-wide implementation process.”

The white paper details the critical development areas in TSV formation and subsequent stacking processes which include those that address insulator/ barrier/seed, etching/plating, thin wafer handling for permanent and temporary bond/debond process, and pick-and-place stacking. In addition, the paper identifies and explores limitations to market adoption of 3-D integration using TSVs, including lack of design tools, thermal management issues, test solutions, and supply chain issues.

The report concludes that the successful achievement of all of these technologies relies on collaboration and participation across the supply chain. The paper calls for more communication and information sharing between the design, test, and manufacturing communities to accelerate the march towards market adoption. To this end, the paper outlines the current industry ecosystem, including the variety of consortia, standards efforts, collaborations, and joint development projects that have been formed to promote development of 3-D integration.