The Assurance Challenges of Advanced Packaging Technologies for Electronics

Advances in microelectronic parts performance are driving towards finer feature sizes, three-dimensional geometries and ever-increasing number of transistor equivalents that are resulting in increased die sizes and interconnection (I/O) counts. The resultant packaging necessary to provide assemble-ability, environmental protection, testability and interconnection to the circuit board for the active die creates major challenges, particularly for space applications, Traditionally, NASA has used hermetically packaged microcircuits whenever available but the new demands make hermetic packaging less and less practical at the same time as more and more expensive, Some part types of great interest to NASA designers are currently only available in non-hermetic packaging. It is a far more complex quality and reliability assurance challenge to gain confidence in the long-term survivability and effectiveness of nonhermetic packages than for hermetic ones. Although they may provide more rugged environmental protection than the familiar Plastic Encapsulated Microcircuits (PEMs), the non-hermetic Ceramic Column Grid Array (CCGA) packages that are the focus of this presentation present a unique combination of challenges to assessing their suitability for spaceflight use. The presentation will discuss the bases for these challenges, some examples of the techniques proposed to mitigate them and a proposed approach to a US MIL specification Class for non-hermetic microcircuits suitable for space application, Class Y, to be incorporated into M. IL-PRF-38535. It has recently emerged that some major packaging suppliers are offering hermetic area array packages that may offer alternatives to the nonhermetic CCGA styles but have also got their own inspectability and testability issues which will be briefly discussed in the presentation,