by Anna Filatova
08/19/2002 | 08:43 AM
As we told you last week, Infineon Technologies AG developed a new integrated circuits assembly technology, which allows reducing their production costs and increasing their performance.
As a result of the research carried out by the company engineers in the Munich laboratory a new soldering method appeared: solid liquid interdiffusion (SOLID), which allowed combining several semiconductor dies within one single package to create one end-product.<%BANNER[article]%>
At present there is a new smart-card controller prototype created by Infineon engineers with the help of the new technology. It will be appearing in the market in H2 2003. The controller combines two semiconductor dies: one with the logics and the other one with the memory cells. This product is expected to go into mass production with 160KB embedded nonvolatile memory.
Infineon prefers to refrain from commentaries on their intentions to license SOLID to other integrated circuits manufacturers or not.
The advantages of the SOLID technology are evident: the semiconductor length gets much shorter, which allows using devices created with this new technology at up to 200GHz frequencies.