With the popularity of portable consumer electronic products, such as smart phones, tablet computers, and so forth, stacked-die assemblies become more and more attractive in microelectronics packages to achieve electronics densification in a small footprint. However, traditional stacked-die assemblies suffer poor alignment between stacked semiconductor dies. Accurate alignment techniques, such as optical alignment, are very expensive and not preferred for low cost products. In addition, the thickness of each stacked semiconductor die may result in a large thickness of the microelectronics package, which may not meet low-profile requirements for modern portable products. Such low profile requirements limit significantly the number of the semiconductor dies that can be stacked.
In the microelectronics package, the stacked semiconductor dies may convey signals to each other by different coupling methods. In a front-end-module (FEM), for instance, an integrated circuit (IC) die may utilize capacitive coupling to transfer signals to a stacked filter die. The capacitive coupling has well defined capacitive coupling coefficients and does not suffer significantly from shifts and misalignments in a stacked-die assembly process. The key requirement for the capacitive coupling is to have electric connections between the stacked semiconductor dies. However, in some cases, like a flip chip die with no through-silicon vias used in the stacked-die assembly, such electric connections may not be available. Consequently, in these cases, magnetic coupling, which does not require electric connections, may be used to transfer signals between non-electrical-connection stacked dies. Herein, the signal transfer function is critically dependent on the precise value of magnetic coupling coefficients, and such precision in the magnetic coupling coefficients impose strict constraints on the stacked-die assembly and the way inductive coupling components are realized in the stacked dies.
In general, the magnetic coupling coefficients have a high degree of variability and depend both on the vertical distance between the inductive coupling components and the horizontal alignment in both X direction and Y-direction dimensions. The misalignment will be significant for a small size inductive coupling component when the horizontal shift is a significant percentage of the diameter of the inductive coupling component. For example, having a 50 μm misalignment is a reasonable value in the stacked-die assembly, but it may be 25% or more of the diameter of the small inductive coupling component. Such horizontal shifts will result in very large magnetic coupling coefficient variations and thus may significantly impact the signal transfer performance. Getting the variability of the magnetic coupling coefficients under control mandates horizontal shifts of 5 to 10 μm, which require expensive and complicated alignment techniques. Further, the distance between the inductive coupling components may also be impacted by the thicknesses of the stacked dies. A large distance between the inductive coupling components may result in lower magnetic coupling coefficients and thus less energy transferred between the stacked dies (more energy lost in the surroundings through escaped magnetic flux).
Accordingly, there remains a need for an improved stacked-die assembly in the microelectronics package, which improves the alignment of stacked dies and enhances the signal transferring performance without expensive and complicated processes. In addition, there is also a need to further reduce the thickness of the final product.