Buried components in printed circuit boards

The coming generations of portable products require significant improvement of packaging technologies, mainlydue to increasing signal frequencies and the demand for higher density of functions. State of the art are organicsubstrates with high-density build-up layers and micro-vias, equipped on both sides with discrete passive and activecomponents. The space requirement of active chips can be already reduced to a minimum by implementing CSPs(chip size packages) or flip chips.A further miniaturization however requires a 3-dimensional integration of components.Besides miniaturization the new applications require signal frequencies of several GHz. In order to maintainsignal integrity, much shorter and impedance-matched interconnects between chips and other components arerequired. Here the Chip in Polymer technology will be described which allows extreme dense 3-dimensional integrationand very short interconnects.This approach is based on the integration of ultra-thin components into builduplayers of printed circuit boards. Details of the technological implementation, like thin die bonding, embeddingby vacuum lamination, laser drilling and metallization, will be discussed. FEM simulations of the thermal performanceof an embedded thin chip will be presented.