Most electronic components contain a single integrated circuit embedded in a plastic package.
Standard MCMs integrate a number of bare die onto a single fine pitch substrate which is then packaged in the normal manner. As a demonstrator for this project the TriMorph design has been used as the basis for a standalone real-time video processing system . The first stage of the 3-D MCM design procedure is to partition the design across individual substrates, minimising given objectives such as real cost and surface routing congestion. A surface routing tool then positions the components on each substrate in order to optimise the vertical routing. The solution space for both vertical partitioning and surface routing is prohibitively large to use an exhaustive search method.