Wafer-chip assembly for large-scale integration

A technique has been developed for achieving a very high density interconnection of active silicon devices to permit the fabrication of large electronic subsystems in essentially monolithic form. The technique has been used to assemble a MOS 2000-bit shift register containing 12 000 MOS transistors on a 300 by 600 mils silicon substrate. The register utilizes ten 200-bit shift-register chips, each containing 1200 transistors. Four-phase MOS logic techniques are used to obtain very low power (0.1 mW/bit) and/or high frequency (10 MHZ) operation. In the technique used to assemble the 2000-bit shift register, silicon large-scale array chips are face-down bonded in adjoining positions on a larger silicon wafer section which may contain additional layers of interconnections and/or active devices as required to form a complete system subassembly. Since the same photoengraving technology is used in the substrate as on the chips, very high packing densities can be achieved, with minimum chip area required for interconnections. This approach also minimizes the parasitic capacitance associated with more conventional techniques for encapsulating and interconnecting large-scale arrays. In the case of MOS circuits, large area-buffer devices are not needed due to the small capacitance in the wafer-chip interconnections. Various techniques have been evolved for processing the chips and substrates produce contact regions which permit the required high fabrication yields. The bonding conditions and metallurgical systems used to date in fabricating large shift-register assemblies will be described and compared with other approaches.