Advanced packaging (3D and chiplets)

Which stacking method, long used in smartphone memory and elsewhere, stacks multiple chips slightly offset from one another and connects each to the substrate with wire bonding?

  1. AStacking with TSVs
  2. BStacking with hybrid bonding
  3. CWire-bonded chip stacking (stacked MCP)
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Answer: C. Wire-bonded chip stacking (stacked MCP)

In a stacked MCP, thinned chips are stacked in a staircase offset or with spacers between them, and the electrodes at each chip's edge are connected to the substrate with fine metal wires. It needs no special processing like TSVs and is cheap to make, so it has been widely used in memory products stacking NAND flash and DRAM. However, its wires are long and limited in number, so TSVs or hybrid bonding are used where ultra-high bandwidth is needed.

  • A. TSV stacking connects chips through electrodes that pass through the silicon.
  • B. Hybrid bonding joins electrodes directly to each other.
  • C. Correct. Each chip is connected by wire bonding.
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More Advanced packaging (3D and chiplets) questions

  1. In contrast to chiplets, what is the conventional approach called in which all the functions a system needs are built into one large chip?
  2. Advanced packaging steps that use front-end-like fine processing at the wafer level, such as forming TSVs and fine redistribution layers, sit between the front end and back end. What are they called?
  3. Which TSMC 2.5D packaging technology is widely used to place AI GPUs and HBM side by side on a silicon interposer and connect them?
  4. Which TSMC fan-out wafer-level packaging technology became widely known when it was adopted for a smartphone processor in 2016?
  5. Which is a challenge of wafer-on-wafer (W2W) bonding, which bonds entire wafers together?