The patent­ed tech­nol­o­gy enables ultra-thin, high-per­for­mance capac­i­tors to be inte­grat­ed clos­er to proces­sors and pow­er rails in AI, HPC and next-gen­er­a­tion semi­con­duc­tor appli­ca­tions. This improves pow­er deliv­ery, ener­gy effi­cien­cy and chip per­for­mance in increas­ing­ly demand­ing com­put­ing environments.

As AI, HPC and chiplet-based sys­tems increas­ing­ly require com­pact, low-induc­tance decou­pling solu­tions placed clos­er to the point of load, the abil­i­ty to inte­grate ultra-thin, high-capac­i­tance-den­si­ty CNF-MIM capac­i­tors direct­ly into or onto inter­posers becomes high­ly rel­e­vant. The patent gives Smoltek addi­tion­al pro­tec­tion around this inte­gra­tion con­cept and sup­ports our long-term busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ty by rein­forc­ing our tech­nol­o­gy dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion, increas­ing the val­ue of our IP port­fo­lio, and improv­ing our posi­tion in dis­cus­sions with poten­tial indus­tri­al part­ners, cus­tomers and licensees.

“The new grant also con­firms that Smoltek’s CNF-MIM plat­form is not lim­it­ed to stand­alone capac­i­tor com­po­nents but can become an enabling tech­nol­o­gy for next-gen­er­a­tion het­ero­ge­neous inte­gra­tion and advanced pack­ag­ing architectures.”

Farzan Gha­vani­ni, CTO at Smoltek

Inter­posers are fre­quent­ly used in today’s advanced pack­ag­ing archi­tec­tures for inte­grat­ed cir­cuits, for exam­ple com­mon­ly used for micro­proces­sors and het­ero­ge­neous inte­gra­tions. The present patent pro­tect­ed con­cepts are built on the need to improve cir­cuit per­for­mance by enabling smarter inter­posers that inte­grates one or sev­er­al com­pact ener­gy stor­age devices. 

The Inter­pos­er patent foot­print now cov­ers all impor­tant mar­kets, includ­ing USA, Japan, Korea and Tai­wan. Smoltek’s patent port­fo­lio now glob­al­ly com­pris­es 98 grant­ed patents. Read more about our IP and patents.

---

Q: What is an inter­pos­er?
A: An inter­pos­er is an inter­me­di­ate sub­strate used to con­nect mul­ti­ple semi­con­duc­tor dies (chiplets, mem­o­ry stacks, log­ic chips, etc.) inside a pack­age. They are com­mon in advanced pack­ag­ing such as 2.5D and 3D integration.

Key fea­tures and ben­e­fits of interposers

• Advanced pack­ag­ing (2.5D/3D): Inter­posers are essen­tial for con­nect­ing mul­ti­ple chiplets in a sin­gle pack­age, elim­i­nat­ing the need for wire bonds.
• Bridge: They act as a bridge con­nect­ing the chip and the cir­cuit board, often by redis­trib­ut­ing fine con­nec­tions from the chip to a coars­er pitch on the cir­cuit board.
• Through Sil­i­con Vias (TSV): Many inter­posers (espe­cial­ly sil­i­con-based ones) use TSV to cre­ate cop­per vias ver­ti­cal­ly through the sil­i­con wafer, pro­vid­ing extreme­ly short and effi­cient connections.
• Improved per­for­mance: By reduc­ing the dis­tance between chips (e.g. between a GPU and HBM mem­o­ry), band­width is improved and pow­er con­sump­tion is reduced.
• Areas of appli­ca­tion: AI accel­er­a­tors, High-per­for­mance GPUs, HBM mem­o­ry sys­tems, Data-cen­ter proces­sors, Net­work­ing ASICs, Advanced het­ero­ge­neous SoCs.