Wafer-Level Integrated Systems: Implementation Issues

Wafer scale integration has been investigated since the early commercialization of integrated circuits. That such a long history of interest in wafer scale integration (WSI) has not led to widespread commercial wafer-scale products suggests that the approach is fatally flawed and of little interest. However, it is more appropriate to regard the failures of WSI as failures in competing with an aggressively expanding silicon VLSI technology which evolved along conventional packaging and system architecture approaches. Looking toward the future, a rather different set of technological and practical constraints are emerging. It is within this future perspective that wafer scale integration emerges as a natural evolution of present device-oriented VLSI chip technologies to future system-oriented wafer-level technologies.: