WESTFORD, MA – Zuken has joined the UCLA Center for Heterogeneous Integration and Performance Scaling (CHIPS), a collaborative academic/industry research endeavor.

Zuken’s role is to enable the team at UCLA CHIPS to use the system-level design capabilities of CR-8000 to layout and optimize interconnect structures between bare dies on the substrate level, along with using CR-8000 Design Force as part of the engineering curriculum to educate students in learning how to design and solve high-speed issues.

CHIPS addresses challenges associated with the growing demand for computing power in heterogeneous computing environments. UCLA CHIPS consists of industrial partners from material suppliers, equipment manufacturers, foundries to system integrators, and includes support from universities and government agencies and industrial consortia, working collaboratively to develop new packaging technologies and system architectures and develop the next-generation workforce.

“Classical CMOS scaling has achieved a 3000x reduction in feature size over the last several decades,” said Prof. Subramanian S. Iyer, UCLA Electrical and Computer Engineering and director of UCLA CHIPS. “Although it is still continuing, development and manufacturing costs are rising dramatically. At the same time, other aspects of the system, such as package and board miniaturization, have not kept up, while the required effort for integrating more and increasingly diverse functions in a SOC approach is growing exponentially.”

UCLA CHIPS is looking beyond SOC integration at the system level.

“At CHIPS we are focused on packaging and system-level integration schemes to improve the overall system performance, rather than improving the individually packaged components.”

UCLA CHIPS has pioneered the concept of small dielet integration directly on a silicon-based interconnect fabric (Si IF) or a flexible fan-out wafer-level package. This allows for tight integration of heterogeneous dies leading to a heterogeneous system on wafer.

“Our R&D team in San Jose has been established to collaborate more closely with our customers and partners in Silicon Valley and across the US to help identify new technologies and methodologies for hardware design,” said Humair Mandavia, chief strategy officer and head of Zuken’s SOZO Center in San Jose. “Our partnership with UCLA CHIPS is another example of this approach that is fruitful for both Zuken and our customers. It puts us into an ideal position to provide more timely and targeted solutions for today’s increasingly complex product development requirements.”