Greater cooperation between chemists, materials scientists and packaging specialists will help resolve these issues to the betterment of the industry. These advances will involve not just stackable packages, but the stacking of chips and wafers, as well. Device stacking can materially reduce the distancesignals must travel between chips, which, in turn, can improve performance while reducing product size. Future systems will continue to shrink in size and use less power. They will also need larger amounts of memory as well as higher speed data processing to handle the increasing amounts of data used in video and natural language applications.
Future systems are likely to incorporate some type of electro-optical technology.
Until the present, the microelectronics packaging industry had comfortably settled into Pb-Sn solders, and many other materials requirements were built around them. The selection of materials that are used in packaging has not necessarily been done in a systematic manner-but rather in an ad hoc manner, thus far. Perhaps the reasons are historic, rather than necessary. The impending requirement in the new century to become completely Pb-free presents us with both challenges and opportunities. The challenges are invariably associated with choosing an alternative to Pb-Sn that will have all the necessary properties, including long term reliability.