The IEEE System Packaging Workshop
Scottsdale, Arizona May 8-10. 2001
Program Chairs Ken Brown and John Stafford

Overview

The workshop has evolved so that it now consists of sessions on
cellular and wireless, Systems-in-a-Package, and Main Frame
Servers, plus Sessions on Convergent Systems Design and one new
for this workshop - a session on Wafer Level Packaging and
Bumping.

Keynote Talk by Larry Moresco

Larry Moresco, formerly Intel, MMS and Fujitsu, and now a
consultant, has as good an overview of the packaging industry as
anyone. His talk puts things into a broader perspective. Main frames
died when parts of a company wanted their own computers to do
their work, and the workstation blossomed. But the internet
came along with a voracious demand for storage and information
processing, and behold - the old mainframes could do the job if
you called them servers. IBM returned to major profitably not
througn anything that Gerstner did, but because the demand for
servers was unstoppable.

Chips became more powerful, and multichipping became the
norm. Chips are about $ 2 each, and can be stacked 2 or 3 high.

The limitation became heat removal, not cost or space. Voltage
regulators moved from the back plane to the printed circuit, and
ground bounce considerations became dominant.

But packaging still remains the deciding factor for
successful manufacturing, and heat removal is still dominant. It
is just that each building block has orders of magnitude more
capability.

The rest of the article (many pages) is in the written version of this newsletter.

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