Package Design Advisor-mechanical, electrical and thermal analysis in one CAD tool

This paper describes a tool called the Package Design Advisor was developed to allow designers of silicon devices to make packaging decisions as part of their product design flow and model the impact of die design on package and vice versa. The tool runs under the X-Windows Motif environment and is completely interactive, with the user requiring to input no detailed geometry data, but chip specifications such as die size, estimated power, number of I/O´s, etc. The major modules are: electrical, mechanical and thermal analysis; electrical model generation, package specs and pad layout guidelines. The mechanical module selects and checks for minimum and maximum die sizes allowable for the different families and other criteria required for assembly. The thermal module computes Θ_ja and Θ_jc and allows the user to configure a cooling system for the package for a specific application (heat fin size, air flow rate, etc.). The electrical analysis module computes the number of power and ground pins required for the core and periphery based on buffer and bus characteristics input by the user, and the electrical model section generates schematics of the package and user specified transmission line models (microstrip, stripline, etc.) to be used in circuit simulation