System-in-Package (SiP) design: Issues, approaches and solutions

With an increasing demand of low-cost, small-size, high-performance and multi-function portable and wireless applications, System-in-Package (SiP), which provides various advantages including shorter time-to-market, better performance and lower cost and allows a combination of the multiple semiconductor technologies, such as silicon (Si), silicon germanium (SiGe), gallium arsenide (GaAs), has aroused a lot of interest from both industries and academia. With the emergence and breakthrough of certain critical assembly and substrate technologies, SiP technologies become promising solutions for today's short life-cycle consumer electronic products. However, in order to timely deliver a first-pass SiP product and achieve the above mentioned advantages offered by SiP: small-size, low-cost and high-performance, careful and concurrent design in both electrical and thermo-mechanical aspects through skillful modeling, accurate and efficient simulation is needed. Trade-off among multi-disciplinary performance constraints, manufacturability and cost is a must as well. In this paper, we address the issues, technical challenges, approaches and solutions including inter-disciplinary performance constraints, signal integrity, testability, etc., of designing different types of low-cost and high-yield SiP modules: digital, analog and mixed-signal. Examples covering techniques, methodologies and technologies utilized in designing different types of SiP modules, including electromagnetic (EM) simulation for signal integrity analysis, thermo-mechanical simulation for high-power devices and different substrate technologies will be provided.