EPIC, a Cost-Effective Plastic Chip Carrier for VLSI Packaging

With the continuing growth in complexity of very large-scale integrated (VLSI) chips, there are increasing demands for high-performance high-pin-count micropackages capable of providing high reliability protection of the chips without being unduly costly. Studies have confirmed that plastic encapsulants, particularly silicones, can provide very high reliability protection indeed. These observations led to the concept of a new plastic chip carrier, named the "EPIC," fabricated by printed circuit board technologies, which has been developed to be suitable for automated bonding and encapsulation of chips into the package, and for subsequent automated surface-mounted assembly of the EPIC onto circuit boards. Reliability evaluations of the EPIC, in comparison with established commercial small outline (SO) plastic micropackages, have demonstrated that high reliability is attainable with EPIC chip carriers and also SO packages from a few sources. Performance measurements have revealed the outstandingly better electrical performance of the EPIC over ceramic equivalents, and versions of EPIC can achieve equivalent or better thermal resistances. Cost analyses show that the EPIC starts with an intrinsically low cost and can achieve very high terminal counts (exceeding 200) while maintaining the cost advantage. Thus high performance and reliability of VLS1 packaging is achievable cost-effectively.