Microelectronic silicon chips, or Integrated Circuits (ICs), have been getting faster and cheaper thanks to our ability to pack more transistors into the same piece of silicon. This is the core of heterogeneous integration - taking separately manufactured components and integrating them to improve performance and functionality of overall systems. IC packaging is going to play a key role in mitigating the effort and cost of creating high-density Integrated Circuits.

Over the past 50 years, microelectronic silicon chips, or Integrated Circuits, have been getting faster and cheaper at a rapid rate. This has been made possible primarily by our ability to pack more transistors into the same piece of silicon – in fact, the number of transistors in an Integrated Circuit has roughly doubled every two years, tracking a prediction made in 1965 that we call Moore’s Law. Imagine that a transistor is a person from millennia ago, living in small groups, and each group is miles from the other. Imagine that the electrons that flow through these transistors and in Integrated Circuits are equivalent to the information humans pass between each other. Over time, human groups grow larger, till eventually we build cities, and more and more people pack themselves into these places. We are able to accelerate the development and transport of information since humans are now living nearer each other and working together, much like a high-density Integrated Circuit. There comes a point, however, when you start running out of space in a dense city – loving thy neighbor becomes a lot harder when they are camped out on your balcony - and someone has the idea to build upward. Let’s stack humans one on top of each other in apartments. What we lose in space and privacy, let’s make up by lowering the cost of ownership and providing additional functionalities like a gym.

This is what heterogeneous integration is all about. We take separately manufactured components and integrate them into a higher-level assembly that improves the performance and functionality of the system as a whole. One way to do this is indeed to stack silicon chips on top of each other, like our skyscraper, instead of spreading them apart on a printed circuit board. But there are other ways to integrate components together in microelectronics, such as building structures called silicon bridges and interposers that communicate much faster between chips.

Heterogeneous integration is really a family of different concepts to enhance performance in microelectronics by optimizing how components relate to each other. As demands on computing are only increasing, and Moore’s law is approaching fundamental limits where it is only getting harder and more expensive to pack transistors at even higher densities, heterogeneous integration has a key role to play to ensure that the industry can continue to do the kinds of things that only a generation ago were not even conceivable.