Zuken Joins UCLA CHIPS Consortium

WESTFORD, MA, May 23, 2019 – Zuken has joined the UCLA Center for Heterogeneous Integration and Performance Scaling (CHIPS), a collaborative academic / industry research endeavor, to develop solutions to address the challenges associated with the growing demand for computing power in heterogeneous computing environments.

Subramanian Iyer (4th from left, front row), Professor of Electrical Engineering at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, and his team of researchers working on the UCLA CHIPS program (image: Chips)

UCLA CHIPS consortium consists of industrial partners from material suppliers, equipment manufacturers, foundries to system integrators, and includes support from universities and government agencies and industrial consortia, working collaboratively to develop new packaging technologies and system architectures and develop the next generation workforce.

Classical Si based CMOS scaling (blue) has achieved an 1000X reduction in feature size over the last five decades. At the same time, package and board miniaturization (red) have not kept up. (image: CHIPS)

Zuken’s role in the consortium is to enable the team at UCLA CHIPS to utilize the system-level design capabilities of CR-8000 to layout and optimize interconnect structures between bare dies on the substrate level, along with using CR-8000 Design Force as part of the engineering curriculum to educate students in learning how to design and solve high-speed issues.

“Classical CMOS scaling has achieved an 3000X reduction in feature size over the last several decades,” explains Prof. Subramanian S. Iyer, Distinguished Professor at the UCLA Electrical and Computer Engineering and director of UCLA CHIPS. “Although it is still continuing, development and manufacturing costs are rising dramatically. At the same time, other aspects of the system such as the package and board miniaturization have not kept up, while the required effort for integrating more and increasingly diverse functions in a SOC approach is growing exponentially.” UCLA CHIPS is therefore looking beyond SOC integration at the system level: “At CHIPS we are focused on packaging and system level integration schemes to improve the overall system performance rather than improving the individual packaged components”, says Prof. Iyer.

CHIPS will develop new methodologies and infrastructure for integrating small dielets on silicon substrates at pitches comparable to on-chip wiring levels, enabling both latencies and bandwidth at on-chip levels (image: Chips)

Introducing a Moore’s Law for Packaging

UCLA CHIPS has pioneered the concept of small dielet integration directly on a Silicon-based interconnect fabric (Si IF) or a flexible Fan-out wafer-level Package (FlexTrate*). This allows for extremely tight integration of heterogeneous dies leading to a heterogeneous System on Wafer. Allowing us to scale the package significantly – a veritable Moore’s Law for packaging. Inter-die connections may be scaled from BGA pitches of several hundred microns to a few microns and inter-die spacing may be reduced down to 20 •m. This allows for significant improvements in latency, bandwidth and energy per bit over conventional packages.

Through its ability to model and layout complex designs on a system level in 2D and 3D, Zuken’s CR-8000 electronic design environment is ideally suited to model the complex die stack-ups and interposer designs required by the Silicon Interconnect Fabric and FlexTrate paradigms. As part of its corporate commitment to engage with customers in the investigation of new solution approaches, Zuken is providing design tools and services both for the CHIPS initiative and for electrical engineering course work in the UCLA curriculum.

Targeted Solutions for Today’s Complex Product Development Requirements

Humair Mandavia, chief strategy officer and head of Zuken’s SOZO Center in San Jose, CA, comments: “Our R&D team in San Jose has been established to collaborate more closely with our customers and partners in Silicon Valley and across the US to help identify new technologies and methodologies for hardware design. Our partnership with UCLA CHIPS is another example of this approach that is fruitful for both Zuken and our customers: It puts us into an ideal position to provide more timely and targeted solutions for today’s increasingly complex product development requirements.”

For more information, visit https://chips.ucla.edu/.

About FlexTrate

FlexTrateTM uses biocompatible polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) as the packaging mold compound in the Fan-Out Wafer Level Packaging (FOWLP), which offers significant advantage in reducing die shift, and wafer warpage compared to conventional epoxy-based molding compounds (EMC) due to its’ lower glass transition temperature and Young’s modulus values. The CHIPS FlexTrateTM platform is also a key enabler of heterogonous integration on flexible substrates, where heterogeneous dies are integrated close to each other on a flexible substrate and interconnected using wafer level processes.

About CHIPS

UCLA Engineering has established the Center for Heterogeneous Integration and Performance Scaling (CHIPS) to address the dramatic changes taking place in the electronic hardware arena that call for a fundamental re-thinking of IC design and manufacture. CHIPS is an interdisciplinary university-led consortium composed of industrial partners, universities and government agencies to address this problem holistically. Starting from the application space, the design environment, and the integration scheme, new materials and components will be developed. CHIPS will develop new methodologies and infrastructure for integrating small dielets at pitches comparable to on-chip wiring levels, enabling both latencies and bandwidth at on-chip levels. CHIPS will also apply monolithic 3D integration using wafer-to-wafer bonding for memory scaling and cognitive applications.

For more information, visit www.chips.ucla.edu.

About Zuken

Zuken is a global provider of leading-edge software and consulting services for electrical and electronic design and manufacturing. Founded in 1976, Zuken has the longest track record of technological innovation and financial stability in the electronic design automation (EDA) software industry. The company’s extensive experience, technological expertise and agility, combine to create world-class software solutions. Zuken’s transparent working practices and integrity in all aspects of business produce long-lasting and successful customer partnerships that make Zuken a reliable long-term business partner.

For more information about the company and its products, visit www.zuken.com.

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