What if glass was the best solution to deal with the Moore's Law? After a decade of research, Intel confirms this hypothesis by revealing one of the first glass substrates for microprocessor packaging. Where packaging refers to the process through which "the microprocessors are soldered onto a host substrate which offers the interconnection paths between the different chips [...] and connects the chips to the outside of the 'package' for connection to the socket a motherboard” (Source: dday.it).
The properties of glass substrates
Compared to currently used organic substrates, glass substrates offer better thermal and mechanical stability and ultra-low flatness. These properties promote the increase in chip surface area and the number of chiplets on a single package. A dynamic that allows, in short, to improve the design rules necessary for artificial intelligence products and future data centers by an order of magnitude.
The objective of the sector
Glass substrates also help improve energy performance and data transmission speed in interconnections, bringing the technology industry closer together. semiconductors to the goal of achieving 1 trillion transistors per package by 2030. And it is precisely by this date that the sector, remaining dependent on organic substrates, would risk reaching its limits in the ability to size transistors on a silicon package.
The perspectives
To guarantee the scalability necessary to promote the future of the semiconductor industry it is therefore now necessary to turn to glass, due to its optical properties, its resistance to temperature variations and the possibility of precisely modulating its density depending on the application .
All the advantages listed will help achieve not only improvements in terms of performance and density, but also in costs and consumption.
It will therefore most likely be thanks to glass substrates that it will be possible to create high-density, high-performance chip packages for data-intensive workloads, which are strategic for artificial intelligence.
Learn more about glass substrates for next-generation packages by visiting the news released by Intel.
Sources: intel.com, dday.it, hwupgrade.it
