Seminar Report ’03 IPCT

INTRODUCTION

Miniaturization has been a key contributor to advances in electronic

technology. Certainly, miniaturization has been made possible mostly through
remarkable breakthroughs in reducing the size of active components. But as
integrated circuits get smaller and more complex, there is an increasing need
to also reduce the space required for the supporting passive components. If
any of the electronic devices such as cellphone, camcorder, computer, or other
consumer electronics system is opened, one or two circuit boards on which are
mounted a few integrated circuits and dozens and dozens of tiny discrete
devices-resistors, capacitors, inductors etc can be seen. It is those so-called
passive devices that dominate the board’s real estate.

Many electronics applications have serious space considerations that

are pressuring manufacturers to reduce component size. Much of the
motivation for this has come from military and aerospace needs, but today's
miniaturization demands are more likely to come from other market segments
including telecommunications (cellular phones), computers (laptops),
instrumentation (handheld devices), and medical electronics (pacemakers).
Such applications continue to drive size reduction in components for
commercial uses as well as for applications with very high reliability
requirements, such as lifesaving medical equipment. However, simply
reducing the case size of a part is not always the most effective way to
miniaturize. Consequently, passive component manufacturers have begun to
combine discrete components into volumetric-efficient multielement
packages. By combining discrete passive components into multielement
packages, designers can save more board space than by simply reducing the
size of the components themselves.

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Seminar Report ’03 IPCT
Passive integration suggests that if the passives were so small and flat,
then they could be inserted between layers of the circuit board itself, rather
than taking space on top of it. The electronic devices could be thinner and
sleeker than they are today, or they could contain more electronics, or if it is a
phone can have much larger batteries and therefore longer talk time and
brighter color screens. The same goes for almost every device from PDAs to
portable DVD players.

The integrated passives would be a part of the circuit board itself,

formed when the board was, so odds are good that their overall cost could
eventually be less than what manufacturers pay today to buy and solder on
discrete devices. Speaking of solder, eliminating it is another advantage of
integration, because bad solder joints are one of the most common reasons
electronic gear fails. Less solder also means less harm from lead waste.

The list of advantages goes on: putting the passives "underground"

leaves more room on the surface of the board for ICs, which means more
design flexibility. And there are electrical benefits, too. Because current
travels along a different path in integrated capacitors than in surface-mounted
components, integrated capacitors can be made freer of the trace amounts of
the inductance, called parasitic inductance, that plagues any capacitor and
limits usefulness in high-frequency circuits. Finally, because the components
are custom-made when the board is, the resistors, capacitors, and inductors
can be sized to any desired value, rather than being chosen from a
manufacturer's list of available parts.

Advantages like these point to a potentially huge shift for the

electronics industry. Over a trillion passive components were bonded to
boards last year, according to the National Electronics Manufacturing
Initiative's road map. These devices are minuscule, and that makes putting
them in place a chore. The smallest discrete passives today measure 0.50 mm

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Seminar Report ’03 IPCT
by 0.25 mm; spread on a sheet of paper, they'd look like ground pepper. Such
compact components are difficult to handle and attach, even for automated
assembly equipment. And though the total cost of each part—including
capital, assembly, and the prorated cost of the underlying board—is less than
two cents on average, collectively the impact of integrated passives on system
cost, reliability, and, most of all, size, could be enormous.

But for these passives to make a big dent in the US $18-billion-a-year

market for discrete passive components, makers of circuit boards will have to
reposition themselves as purveyors of passive electronic networks. It's starting
to happen, but slowly. Such manufacturers as Gould, Shipley, Ohmega,
MacDermid, DuPont, Oak-Mitsui, 3M, and Sanmina all market products and
processes for integrating resistors directly into printed-circuit boards, using at
least four different technologies; and for integrating capacitors, using at least
five. These sizable companies have all poured tens of millions of dollars in
R&D funds into proving the concept. In the meantime, several other
companies, including California Micro Devices Corp. and AVX Corphave
been working on an alternative approach to integrating passives. They are
selling arrays and networks of miniaturized passive devices in single IC-like
packages.

In a sense, the situation with passive components today is a lot like that
of active devices 40 years ago, when Intel, Fairchild, and others had just
introduced ICs that combined active devices like transistors and diodes on a
single substrate. But don't expect Moore's Law to apply to passives. These
components cannot be scaled down into the submicron realm occupied by
active devices. The reason, of course, is that passive components have to
handle signals whose amplitude cannot be reduced arbitrarily—say,
microwave signals going to a cellphone antenna or inputs for analog-to-digital
conversion.

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Seminar Report ’03 IPCT

INTEGRATING PASSIVES

The technologies available for the packaging of microelectronics at

that time were generally thick film and thin film circuits hermetically sealed in
a package made of ceramic or metal with glass to metal feed-throughs. The
need for a package, interconnect board plus discrete components complicated
the assembly of the hybrid microcircuit and increased volume and weight
requirement.A new technology that could integrate these three functions
would dramatically reduce size and assembly complexity with concurrent
improvements in cost and reliability.

None of then existing technologies were suitable for all three functions.
The cofired ceramic could provide a durable hermetic package but was limited
to refractory metal systems due to the high firing temperatures. There are
several disadvantages: high trace resistances, a requirement of plating for all
exposed metal to provide for corrosion resistance and subsequent
metallurgical connections, and firing in a reducing atmosphere which limited
the range of cofirable film components which could be included.

Thick and thin films use gold, silver or copper metallurgy which have
excellent conductivity and do not require plating while being, except for
copper. Thick films, however, were not in general dense or strong enough for
use in building hermetic packages and were expensive when used for high
count multiplayer interconnect structures.

Low Temperature Cofired Ceramics(LTTC) was seen as a potential

solution for achieving a new integrated packaging technology from a
combination of thick film and low temperature cofired dielectrics .LTTC has
many advantages such as it allows high density of lines throughout the part, be

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Seminar Report ’03 IPCT
able to construct various geometries of interconnects by layer cut outs, good
heat transfer ability, etc. In addition to offering competitive capabilities in
packaging and interconnection, LTTC has a clear advantage over other
technologies in the area of integral passive components. They are

• Reduction in the number of contacts and transitions: traditional

assembly has the internal contacts of the components themselves, the
transition to the attachment material and then to the interconnect. By
integrating these transitions, the associated losses are reduced
dramatically.

• Increasing reliability : Failures occur primarily at transitions or

interfaces between materials. Reducing the number of transitions increase
the reliability.

• Cost saving : Few additional steps are required for component

integration and a large number of assembly steps are eliminated.

• Density saving : Component size and component count are the typical
drivers for assembly size. The same components can be effectively spread
”two dimensionally” within the package substrate or the package itself in
traditionally unused or waste area.

• LTTC provides wider components value range compare to other

technologies.0.1Ω to 10 MΩ for resistors under the tolerance of 25%, 4pF
to 0.04µ F for capacitors with the typical tolerance from 5 to 10%, 15nH
to over three order of magnitude inductors with the tolerance around 5%.

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Seminar Report ’03 IPCT
Integrated passive technologies are not exactly new. They have been
used for decades in the ceramic substrates that underlie circuits in military,
microwave, and mainframe computer systems. But those represent a specialty
within the electronics market. The vast majority of circuit boards today are
made using FR4, the ubiquitous green epoxy insulator reinforced with glass
fiber. FR4 boards are formed by sandwiching alternating layers of insulator
with etched copper circuit traces and laminating them under heat and pressure.
Drilled holes, or vias, plated with copper, connect conductor segments on
different layers to form circuit interconnects.

A smaller but growing portion of the circuit board market has been
going to "flex," which are laminated stacks of unreinforced polyimide
(Kapton), polyester, or layers of other polymer film, each 25 to 125 µm thick,
with copper traces on one or both sides. Because the polymer layers can be
thinner, enabling smaller vias, flex allows more interconnects to be crammed
into a given area than is possible with FR4. But flex costs more per square
centimeter than FR4.

In both FR4 and flex, the presence of organic material limits their
processing temperatures to about 250 °C, far below the 800 to 1200 °C used in
processing ceramic substrates. So to put passives within the layers of FR4 and
flex boards, engineers had to come up with new techniques.

The components in these boards can be no thicker than a single layer of

the board, maybe only a few micrometers. So for all intents and purposes, the
devices are planar rather than three-dimensional. Manufacturers are using
several different techniques, including sputtering, plating, chemical vapor
deposition, screen-printing, and anodization, to deposit various film materials
to produce the passives. All of those deposition methods are compatible with
the 250 °C limit for FR4 and flex. Depending on the process, technicians can

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Seminar Report ’03 IPCT
add material just where it is needed, or cover an entire board layer with it and
then subtract material where it is not wanted.

For example, resistors can be formed by bridging two copper

interconnects on the board with a resistive film. That film can be nickel
phosphide plated on a board layer, carbon-loaded epoxy that is screen printed,
tantalum nitride that is sputtered, or a ceramic-metal nanocomposite that is
printed. There are other possibilities; those are just the most cost-effective
options for making boardswith a high density of resistors.

For capacitors, the main challenge is finding materials that can be

deposited using techniques that are compatible with the materials and
processes used on the rest of the board. For example, barium titanate, though
common in conventional capacitors, is not an ideal choice because to reach its
proper dielectric value—which indicates its ability to concentrate an electric
field—it must be fired at a blistering 600 °C, which no polymer board could
withstand.

However, researchers have found a way to integrate even these high

temperature dielectrics. They can first be fired on a foil of copper, which is
then processed and laminated inside the board. To guarantee that integrated
passives will make circuit boards smaller, the material's dielectric properties
must be such that it takes only a small area of a layer of the circuit board to
make up a capacitor.

The average value of cellphone capacitors is typically 1 to 10

nanofarads and there can be hundreds of capacitors in each board; a
manufacturer would have to pack hundreds or even thousands of nanofarads
of capacitance into the board. For contrast, most current products for making
integrated capacitors are limited to polymer-based low-capacitance density

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Seminar Report ’03 IPCT
materials good for only about 5 nF/cm2. A new company, Xanodics is
commercializing a capacitor process,

called Stealth, that is based on tantalum (common in cellphone capacitors)..

We anodize it at room temperature to create tantalum pentoxide in a solution
that is benign to the board and its copper conductors. This forms devices with
capacitance to be sure that the integration would reduce the board's size.
DuPont and others are developing processes that should yield over 100
nF/cm2, a value good enough to replace many of a cellphone's surface-
mounted capacitors with integrated ones.

And researchers are confident that they will soon achieve values over 1
µF/cm2, allowing integration into even smaller areas per unit area higher than
200 nF/cm2. So a great many capacitors can be integrated onto the same board
layer. In addition, the process makes particularly thin capacitors, 0.1 to 0.2 µm
thick. This slender profile cuts own on the capacitors' parasitic inductance,
and that makes them handle high frequencies better.

Integrating passives can drastically reduce the size of an ordinary circuit

board [top]. Here, four capacitors and six resistors have been removed from
the surface and put into an extra layer of circuit board [bottom]. Resistors are
copper connection points bridged by a resistive film, and capacitors are
conductive plates separated by a thin film of dielectric material.

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Seminar Report ’03 IPCT

After the board is laminated, holes are drilled and plated to form vias
that connect the integrated components to other board wiring. An integrated
one can replace not every value of passive; two remain on the surface. Some
commercial processes would require separate capacitor and resistor layers.

In contrast to capacitors, integrated inductors are a snap to fabricate.

They are nothing but spirals of interconnect metal. The challenge is not in the
materials or process technology but in their design. The main problem is that
any nearby metallic structures, such as interconnects or other inductors, will
interfere with their magnetic fields and change their performance. The
dielectric material is FR4 and the conductor material is Aluminium. At low

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Seminar Report ’03 IPCT
frequency, the reactive inductance is smaller than the series resistance,
therefore, the resistance dominates the impedence. The resonant frequency is
determined by the parasitic capacitance of the inductors.

Inductors are angled away from each other to avoid crosstalk in this low-
pass filter that fits between the layers of a circuit board. Designed by one of
the authors, and built by Integral Wave Technologies for NASA's Langley
Research Center, the thickest part of this filter is less than 6 µm. Capacitors
are made from a thin-film oxide, inductors from copper.

A VERY FLAT FILTER

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Seminar Report ’03 IPCT

ADVANTAGES OF PASSIVE INTEGRATION

• Integrating passives can drastically reduce the size of an ordinary

circuit
• More design facility
• Low cost
• Electrical benefits
• Performance specific
• Better wireability
• Increased reliability
• High yield

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Seminar Report ’03 IPCT

ROAD BLOCKS ON THE WAY

Just as the early time of the surface mount components, integrated

passive components is a fairly new technology and there are several inhibitors
keep embedded passives from reaching their market potential.

There are three main barriers to bringing integrated passives into the
market: too few design tools, inadequate computer models for predicting
costs, and insufficient infrastructure. Better design tools are crucial because
taking passives off the surface of a board and burying them generally means
that more board layers are required, complicating circuit trace routing. A few
design tools can take this complication into account when producing
automated layouts; a couple is just now becoming available from Zuken Inc.
and Ohmega Technologies Inc.

The lack of software to analyze costs is also a problem. Before board

fabricators will get into the business of manufacturing passive components,
they will want to have a pretty good idea of how it would affect their bottom
lines. And cost calculations are tricky: unlike discrete, integrated passives
cannot be sorted for yield and value precision; one bad component may scrap
the entire board. And although most analyses suggest that passive integration
can save money, the analyses are very application-specific. For instance,
while there is probably a cost advantage to integrating cell phones and other
small devices having a high density of components, it may not be cheaper to
integrate larger boards, such as those in desktop computers, where size is not a
concern. Complicating matters is the fact that the surface-mount world is not
standing still; discrete components are getting smaller, cheaper, and more
closely packed every year.

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Seminar Report ’03 IPCT
The blem of infrastructure is the usual chicken-and-egg story. When
plotted against time, technology adoption typically takes the form of an S
curve, meaning prothat little happens at first but eventually everyone gets on
board.We are at the bottom of the curve now, but there is evidence that
adoption is increasing. About a dozen products for integrating capacitors are
on the market now, which is double the number a year ago. Still, board
manufacturers may be squeamish until there are enough vendors in the
business to guarantee a second source for their materials and processes should
their first choice fail.

The other inhibitors are:

• Need to demonstrate the technical viability of integral
substrates,including materials,processes,design and test system.
• Need to demonstrate the value or economic justification for
substituting discrete capacitor and resistors with integral technology.
• Potential delay to the product development cycle. These passives
are usually designed in the final stages of a product.The economic impact
of a product delay could easily out way any cost saving in size reduction or
conversion costs.
• Integral passives reduce engineering and manufacturing
flexibility.The ability to apply engineering changes to an integral substrate
without delaying the schedule is critical.
• Qualification-most of the processes, materials, vendors and
products in this space are not qualified.
• Lack of availability from multiple suppliers.
• Industry standards are required to capture the true market
potential for this technology.

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Seminar Report ’03 IPCT

A KILLER APPLICATION

DECOUPLING may be considered as a killer application of integrated

passives. Decoupling is used in high-frequency digital logic circuits, such as
in the motherboards of laptop computers. These circuits place severe demands
on power-distribution systems to supply stable, noise-free power during the
clock-driven simultaneous switching of millions of transistor gates.

Decoupling capacitors help supply these large current surges, ramping

as fast as 500 A/ns, to high-power microprocessor and logic ICs during the
switching portions of clock cycles. This technique ensures that the logic
voltage levels do not drop unacceptably as a result of the high current
demands on the power supply, which may be many centimeters away and
connected by unavoidably resistive and inductive conductor planes.Between
cycles of current demand, the power-distribution system recharges these
capacitors in preparation for the next switching cycle. With ever-increasing
clock speeds, decreasing power supply voltage, and increasing current
demand, designers are finding it harder and harder to supply low-impedance,
noise-free power to ICs. The main problem is that decoupling capacitors can't
deliver charge quickly, because of their intrinsic inductance.

Decoupling is an obvious first application for integrated capacitors for

two reasons: they won't take up valuable real estate near the power-hungry
microprocessor, and their electrical performance is superior in this application
by virtue of their extremely low parasitic inductance. Especially on digital
circuit boards, surface-mounted capacitors surround the big ICs, often on both
sides of the board. Since the speed of the system is often limited by memory
access times, eliminating the capacitors from the surface and moving memory
closer to the microprocessors would result in a smaller and faster system.

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Seminar Report ’03 IPCT
Though special discrete capacitors are being built with fairly low
inductance, none of them can compare with an integrated parallel-plate
capacitor using a thin dielectric located between the power and ground planes
(conductor coated layers of the board dedicated to either the ground or power
supply). For example, thin-film devices that we built on flex at the University
of Arkansas (Fayetteville) and Xanodics deliver several hundred nanofarads
with less than 3 picohenrys of inductance and a trifling 10 milliohms of
resistance. In comparison, a typical surface-mounted capacitor would have
several hundred picohenrys of inductance. Integrated decoupling will likely
first appear not in the circuit board itself, but in the small piece of substrate
included in the so called ball-grid-array packaging of high-performance
microprocessors.Putting the capacitance layer within the package avoids the
intervening inductance of the package-to-board connection.

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Seminar Report ’03 IPCT

FUTURE SCOPE

Less than 5 percent of the trillion-plus passive devices mounted on FR4

and flex boards this year will be surface-mounted passive arrays and passive
networks, and hardly any passives will be fully integrated into the circuit
board. The circuit board business, in the United States, at least, is largely a
contract industry, with much of it removed from the designers of circuits and
equipment makers. This gulf makes board makers a bit conservative and slow
to change relative to, say, the chip industry, where all aspects of development,
design, and manufacture are often in the same company. Still, integrated
resistor and capacitor layers are starting to become available from reputable
suppliers and a few consumer products are showing up with at least some of
the passives integrated, and these should lead the way for significant market
penetration in the near future. It is hard to say when, if ever, will more than
half the passives be integrated. The microelectronics industry is full of
cautionary tales. But some new manufacturing technologies do prove their
economic viability and become industry standards, such as surface mounting.

Whether or not passive integration becomes an industry standard will

depend on its economic viability. Certainly, it is viable for decoupling and, in
fact, may be the only way to handle the future generations of high-power,
high-frequency microprocessors. For discrete replacement in general, though,
the best processes and materials are still being identified. If we find suitable
technologies, then passive integration will probably show a long, steady climb
in use the way surface mounting supplanted through-hole mounting in the
1980s. As the infrastructure, supply chain, and industry acceptance grow
simultaneously, eventually integration will gain some significant fraction of
the total market and put passives in their place: hidden, ubiquitous, and cheap.

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Seminar Report ’03 IPCT

CONCLUSION

The need for increased product miniaturization and increased product

function will eventually drive the electronic product to increase their use of
integral passive components.Embedded passives offer increased component
density beyond the physical capability of discrete-like devices.They also offer
high product reliability and eventually lower overall system costs via
decreased conversion costs.

Although severely lagging behind developments in active components,

passive component integration is allowing the development of an assortment
of new product offerings. Some of these items have been possible for several
years, but lack of widespread customer acceptance and high costs have slowed
their introduction into the general marketplace. Some items are yet to be
developed. For example, because several manufacturers can perform both
thick- and thin-film manufacturing, hybrid components combining both
technologies may be forthcoming. Passive component integration is and will
continue to be an important contribution in the development of increasingly
smaller medical electronics.

Resistors, inductors, and capacitors are disappearing from view,

integrated into the circuit board itself. Passive integration may be the only
way to handle the future generations of high-power, high-frequency
microprocessors.

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Seminar Report ’03 IPCT

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. R.Ulrich and L.Shaper, “ Putting passives in their place”, IEEE spectrum,

July 2003.

2. R.Ulrich, “Moving embedded passives from the Lab to the Fab”, circuit

tree, march 2003.

3. B.Etienne and P.A.Sandborn, “Application – Specific economic analysis

of integral passives in printed circuit boards ”, proceeding of the IMAPS

advanced packaging material processes, properties and interfaces

symposium; march 2001.

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Seminar Report ’03 IPCT

CONTENTS

1. INTRODUCTION 1

2. INTEGRATING PASSIVES 4

3. ADVANTAGES OF PASSIVE INTEGRATION 11

4. ROAD BLOCKS ON THE WAY 12

5. A KILLER APPLICATION 14

6. FUTURE SCOPE 16

7. CONCLUSION 17

8. BIBLIOGRAPHY 18

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Seminar Report ’03 IPCT

ABSTRACT

A circuit board is one on which a few integrated circuits and dozens

and dozens of tiny discrete devices-capacitors, resistors and may be a few
inductors are mounted. Now imagine what designers could do if the passives
were so small and flat, that they could be inserted between layers of circuit
board itself, rather than taking up space on the top of it. This can be done only
by passive integration. The main advantage is putting passives “underground”
leaves more room on the surface of the board for IC’s which means more
design flexibility.

Integrated passives are not exactly new, they have been used for
decades in the ceramic substrate that underlie circuits in military, microwave
and mainframe computer systems. But those represent a speciality within the
electronics market. Passive integration may be the only way to handle the
future generations of high frequency, high power microprocessors.

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Seminar Report ’03 IPCT

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I extend my sincere gratitude towards Prof. P. Sukumaran

Head of Department for giving us his invaluable knowledge and
wonderful technical guidance

I express my thanks to Mr. Muhammed Kutty our group tutor

and also to our staff advisor Ms. Biji Paul for their kind co-operation
and guidance for preparing and presenting this seminar.

I also thank all the other faculty members of AEI department

and my friends for their help and support.

Dept. of AEI 21 MESCE Kuttippuram