SiliconPipe was founded in 2002 to develop innovative copper interconnect technology and bring it to market through licensing agreements with system designers and product developers. The company’s founders include industry veteran Joseph Fjelstad, a noted electronics industry innovator and author, who is the first person to be appointed a Fellow at Tessera Technologies.

Mission

Our mission is to enable electronic system-level interconnections to perform at silicon speed, yet operate at reduced power and be easy to build and qualify.

Background

IC Performance Trends

The on-chip clock rate of silicon microprocessors and other large-scale integrated circuits has been increasing and could reach clock rates of 10 Gbps in the next 3-5 years. Smaller scale integrated circuits have already been demonstrated with multi-Gbps data rates. Next-generation advanced information processing systems will require large aggregate computational and communication bandwidths.

The performance of PCB technology that provides chip-to-chip interconnections has increased at very modest rate as compared to the chips. For electrical interconnect technology, the primary limitations to implementing high-speed interconnections are frequency-dependent loss and high power dissipation.

Interconnect Performance Trends

Creative silicon interfaces have been developed to compensate for the loss resulting from current passive interconnects. Current copper-based solutions involve adding costly I/O (SERDES) to chips and increasing I/O power. This greatly increases the complexity, risk and cost of designing high-performance electronics products. As computing systems incorporate higher frequency busses, traditional copper interconnects become less effective and more expensive.

Today, using conventional electronic off-chip wiring, the chips inherent speed cannot be fully utilized, and traditional electrical interconnect techniques utilizing conventional PCB interconnects remain a limiting bottleneck in terms of speed, density, wiring length, cross talk and driving power requirements.

Development Costs

Another fundamental problem in designing high speed interconnect systems is that each part of the solution (IC, package, PCB and connector) has been developed independently, with each component designer aiming at a moving target effected by each other component. A final solution always involves multiple iterations.

What about Optoelectronics?

Optoelectronic technologies, which are optimized for long distance telecommunication and data communication applications, do not have the necessary characteristics (power dissipation, form factor, cost, signal integrity) needed for interconnects between high-speed electronic chips at the PCB and backplane interconnect level.

Development of Supercharged Copper

SiliconPipe has developed extensive intellectual property in the area of high-speed copper interconnect for IC packages, connectors, PCB configuration and backplanes. In addition to innovative interconnection we also have developed technology for reduction of capacitance in data transmission lines through reducing ESD structure capacitance and embedded passive structures. The company’s copper-based interconnection technology is offered for license under the brand name of Supercharged Copper.