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IBM Technical Journals

Special report: Celebrating 50 years of the IBM Journals
All topics > Hardware Design and Implementation >

Electronic packaging evolution in IBM

Award plaque by D. P. Seraphim
and I. Feinberg

A quarter century of innovation in the development of packaging for semiconductors has culminated in the announcement of the IBM 4300 Series of computers and the IBM 3081. This technology has been built on a broad and expanding base starting with packaging for the 1400 Series in the late 1950s. In the next series, System/360, IBM chose to follow a unique approach which employed solder joints for the semiconductor connections, allowing ultimately a higher density and total number of interconnections compared to the rest of the industry. This has driven the packaging at the module level to achieve extremely high density and has led to multichip interconnections and multilayers on this first level of package. The dramatically increasing circuit function at the module level requires area arrays of pins to be able to get enough of them in a small area. Thus the next level (second level) of packaging has likewise been driven to provide many layers of dense interconnections to link to the module pins. New types of plated through holes join the many layers of interconnection. The highlights of the technical approaches which have been developed over the twenty-five-year period are discussed briefly in this paper.

Originally published:

IBM Journal of Research and Development, Volume 25, Issue 5, pp. 617-629 (1981).

Significance:

This paper describes innovations in the development of packaging for semiconductors over a period of several decades. The IBM System/360™, for example, made use of special solder joints for the semiconductor connections, allowing ultimately a higher density and total number of interconnections compared to the rest of the industry.

Innovations, which have led to the major advances in interconnection density at the chip carrier level of packaging, included good thermal conducting ceramic substrates and multilayer technology with dense vertical interconnection (via) capability. The innovations that have led to the major advances in the interconnection density at the second level of package include plated through-hole technology and field-replaceable units with connector technology. The authors conclude by noting that “These and other innovations described in this paper have allowed circuit densities at the back panel to grow approximately three orders of magnitude in less than three decades.”

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