High-Speed Metallic Interconnects in Multilayer Rigid FR4-Printed Circuit Board (PCB)

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop an innovative high speed metallic interconnects technology for chip-to-chip interconnects utilizing standard material (e.g. FR4). With the continued growth in the integration density of CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) and clock frequency of microprocessors (on-chip), the aggregate bandwidth required between future-generation microprocessors and chipsets will increase sharply. Driving serial or parallel data at high speed over copper on FR4 based printed-circuit boards (PCBs) (off-chip) is becoming a severe design constraint and must be overcome to fully utilize the chip performance and significantly enhance the system-performance. The proposed electrical interconnects technology can be implemented into standard FR4-PCB, thereby utilizing standard manufacturing processes, and could increase the signal carrying capacity over 20 Gb/s, more than 5 times that of standard interconnects technology. Implementing the proposed metallic interconnect technology will eliminate the need to use non-standard material(s) in PCB or active components inside integrated circuits (IC) to obtain similar results, which will in turn decrease the complexity, cost, and total power-budget of the system. The purpose of this project is to develop high speed metallic interconnects by using standard-PCB friendly to manufacturing processes, which can be utilized as a common platform technology for a wide range of electronic applications and can extend the usage life-cycle of standard FR4 material and standard manufacturing processes for the next 20 years. The proposed high speed metallic interconnects will have enormous advantages for various next generation applications, including high speed PCs, servers, networking systems, gaming machines, communication systems, imaging and video systems, etc. The U.S. faces an unknown set of challenges in the area of high speed interconnects (PCB). Most board-level and related product-oriented work is being shifted offshore; therefore, no development efforts are being undertaken in U.S. industries. The U.S. share of the $45 billion world market dropped from 62 to 8 percent in the last 10 years. This project will develop the electrical interconnects on FR4-based printed circuit board (PCB) to drive the signal more than 10 Gb/s per channel, which will have profound influence on the competitiveness of U.S. industry. The development of the proposed interconnect technology will enable a large number of end users to take advantage of economies of scale by inexpensively manufacturing this high speed board and to leverage development costs to create the general software, analysis, and information technology infrastructure that will make such systems powerful, inexpensive, and deployable in huge numbers. Banpil’s goal is to create and develop high speed metallic interconnect technology for such a platform. This project will enable the development of this proposed high speed electrical interconnect solution in FR4 based PCB to meet industry needs in a timely manner. Banpil has the opportunity to lead the industry in development work through Phase II project and create global leaders in the area of high speed electrical interconnects.