The various projects concentrate on the development of technologies which overcome the performance limiting factors in devices, interconnections and packages. The switching speed of today's devices is limited not only by the carrier transit time, but more importantly, also by the parasitic capacitors and resistors. The integration of power devices with digital and analog electronics promises to revolutionize the power control industry and other related applications. The commonly used aluminum alloy is not expected to meet the future requirements. In this project, we develop the technology, and characterize the physical and electrical behavior of multilevel copper interconnections.
Current emphasis is on chemical vapor deposition and plating techniques.
The integration of Cu interconnections with various low K dielectrics is also under investigation. The application of advanced metallization technology to fabricate critical monolithic elements such as inductor for RF telecommunication is explored. On and off chip data transmission is a bottleneck of communication in many high speed systems. In this project, we study the utilization of multichip module technology to eliminate the packages and reduce the spatial distances between chips. Testing of the bare chips before they are mounted on the module is widely regarded as the most critical problem plaguing the progress of the industry.