3DIC.ORG [2.5D/3D]

Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate (CoWoS®)

www.3dic.org/CoWoS

TSMC CoWoS® (Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate) technology integrates multiple chips side-by-side onto a interposer containing through-silicon vias (TSVs) by chip-to-wafer bonding process, which is followed by CoW chip assembly onto a substrate (CoW-on-Substrate).

TSV Processes

Via-first TSV

Via-middle TSV

Via-last TSV before bonding

Via-last TSV after bonding

2.5D integration

www.3dic.org/2.5D integration

2.5D integration refers to the technology that stacks active chips side-by-side on a passive Si/glass interposer (or the intel's embedded multi-die interconnect bridge, EMIB), which enables high density chip-to-chip interconnects.

Xilinx Virtex-7 Interposer-based FPGAs

See main article 3D FPGA.

The Xilinx 2.5D FPGAs from the Virtex-7 family fabricated by TSMC using the CoWoS technology are the first commercially available silicon interposer-based FPGAs.

GPU and HBM DRAM on Si Interposer

The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X GPU released in June 2015 uses the 2.5 integration, in which HBM stacks and GPU are assembled on a Si interposer side-by-side. Another example is the Nvidia Tesla P100 GPU with HBM2 3D DRAM. It was officially announced in April 2016.

Embedded Multi-die Interconnect Bridge (EMIB)

See main article EMIB.

Embedded Multi-die Interconnect Bridge (EMIB) is an approach developed by Intel to in-package high density interconnect of heterogeneous chips. The EMIB contains no TSVs and is smaller comparing to interposer.

Altera FPGA with EMIB and HBM DRAM

See main article 3D FPGA.

Altera has launched the Stratix 10 FPGA which consists of HBM2 3D DRAM combined with FPGAs by using the EMIB.

Applications

Announcement Date	Company	Product	HBM 1&2	Interposer	Packaging Technology
Oct 2013	Xilinx	Virtex-7 2000T FPGA	FPGA slices	Si TSV interposer	CoWoS
June 2015	AMD	Radeon R9 Fury X GPU (Fiji)	GPU + HBM1	Si TSV interposer	CoWoS
June 2015	Altera	Stratix 10 FPGA	FPGA + HBM2	EMIB (No TSVs)	Multi-chips assembly on substrate with embeded EMIB
April 2016	Nvidia	Tesla P100 GPU	GPU + HBM2	Si TSV interposer	CoWoS