Semi-Therm Course: Cooling Challenges in 3D Packaging

For those, like me, that don't cast our info nets nearly wide enough, this event might have escaped our attention.  That is unfortunate.  The 26th Annual Thermal Measurement, Modeling and Management Symposium is being held next week in Santa Clara.  One course, "Cooling Challenges in 3D Packaging" is of particular interest to those who follow this humble blog.  The short course will be presented by Dereje Agonafer, Ph.D.  Dr. Agonafer is a Professor and Director, Elec, MEMS & Nanoelectronics Systems Packaging Center at the University of Texas at Arlington (Faculty profile).

I extracted the course abstract from the event's Advance Program:

The convergence of computing and communications dictates building up rather than out.  As consumers demand more functions in their hand-held devices, the need for more memory in a limited space is increasing, and integrating various functions into the same package is becoming more crucial.  Over the past few years, die stacking has emerged as a powerful tool for satisfying these challenging Integrated Circuit packaging requirements.  The first part of the course will be a review of electronic packaging based on the instructor's over 10 years of experience teaching a packaging course.  This will be followed by an overview of 3D packaging and an in depth discussion of the thermo/mechanical challenges in stacked packaging based on the author's recently published papers.  Package architectures evaluated in this presentation are rotated stack, staggered stack, stacking with spacers, stacks with thermal vias and package on package.  Moving forward in more complex combinations such as stacking logic and memory, there is a desire to include thermal design in the upstream phase concurrently with the architecture design.  In order to develop design guidelines for microprocessors based on both thermal and device clock performance, it is necessary to know the characteristics of each functional block on the die, guidelines of which are provided by the architectural team.  For better thermal performance, the functional blocks are then repositioned and the resulting maximum temperatures are noted for all the cases.  Recent studies at an attempt to a co-architectural design where design optimization is based on both thermal and architectural objectives will also be addressed.

The course looks like it will be extremely interesting.  If anyone does have the opportunity to attend, I'd sincerely love to hear more about the information presented.

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