Meeting the packaging challenges of today and tomorrow

Recently, a friend of mine called in a panic. He had dropped his iPhone and it was in pieces. He wanted to know if I could help repair it, since he knew I was an electrical engineer. Unfortunately, the damage was beyond a simple repair and he ended up purchasing a replacement. After we determined that it could not be repaired, my curiosity got the better of me. I asked if I could keep the broken device to do my own "tear down" of the hardware. I was curious.

When I opened the case, I was impressed by the high-density packaging to cram all the functions into one slim, attractive product. Inside were several complex digital ICs and many smaller, mostly mixed-signal devices, housed in chip-scale and near-chip-scale packages. This kind of packaging effort is second-nature to us at Maxim, where we are always looking at ways to integrate functions and reduce component count. Also on the circuit board were many passive surface-mounted components and even a few discrete transistors—many of these small devices and components were devoted to power management and interface functions.

The "clutter" of discrete components and mixed-signal circuits occupies a significant amount of board space—almost 20% to 30% by my estimation. This scenario, though, is not unique. Just about every handheld product today is space constrained, which is also a prime example of how higher integration can "buy back" some of the limited space on the PC board. In fact, all portable systems will likely benefit from more-integrated solutions.

Many of the products that we design at Maxim are targeted at this same handheld portable application space. Over the years we worked closely with major customers to create highly integrated solutions on a single chip. Such integrated solutions, both custom and off-the-shelf, provide multiple benefits to the customer. Primarily, of course, the chips will reduce the component count and save space, but they will also often lower the power consumption.

Fewer components also translate into higher system reliability—there are simply fewer parts to fail. For the system vendor, fewer components lead to a shorter bill-of-materials, which reduces purchasing and manufacturing overheads.

Lower power consumption is a result of two important factors. First, attention to detail in circuit design minimizes operating currents; and second, integration improves efficiencies because the signals don't have to travel as far and parasitic losses are smaller. Lower power consumption also offers designers two options: the system can deliver longer battery life if the same size battery is used; or the system could be made smaller and lighter and still deliver the same runtime as the previous product if the battery size is reduced.

To implement highly-integrated solutions Maxim leverages proprietary, state-of-the-art process technologies and our extensive library of intellectual property developed during our long history of designing highly integrated, low-power analog and mixed-signal ICs. We also have leading-edge, tiny chip-scale packages (UCSPs™) and wafer level packaging (WLP) technology. This combination lets us deliver solutions that meet today's and tomorrow's design challenges. Talk to us about your system requirements.

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