Advanced packaging technology promises lightweight portable SATCOM terminals

The authors consider a new multichip module packaging, high density interconnect (HDI), and its application to portable terminals for military satellite communication. The HDI process provides one of the highest packing densities and reliabilities of the multichip hybrid approaches used for miniaturization, at life cycle costs which are competitive with the more conventional surface mount printed circuit board packaging. HDI is a wafer scale hybrid packaging technology that permits multichip modules to be fabricated without regard to the actual substrate material or semiconductor die size. Utilizing a laser-based adaptive lithography technique and a maskless process. HDI allows bare dice to be placed almost edge-to-edge on a (typically) ceramic substrate and interconnected via a multilayer structure. A portable super-high-frequency (SHF) terminal system has been partitioned for potential HDI implementation, and the design of an HDI voice processor (vocoder) module has begun