WAFER SCALE INTEGRATED CIRCUITS

摘要

Like integrated circuits or "chips" (10) on a wafer (22) supported on a printed circuit board (24) are supplied with power by VCC and VSS bondwires (20) stitch bonded to pads on all chips (10). The bondwires are interrupted at the equator so that a supply line fault in the top or bottom half of the wafer will not affect any chips in the lower half of the wafer, and vice versa. Global signal lines (18) WCK (wafer clock) and CMND (command) are similarly treated, being formed in metal which is interrupted in an equatorial band (26). Every chip (10) has input and output bond pads for data input and output to a chain of chips grown using inter-module connections in a manner known per se. The chips may thus be masked using like reticles while always having available edge chips (10') whose input and output bond pads can be used to make external connections, via bondwires (38).