Original 45nm Intel® Core™ Microarchitecture

  Section 6 of 10  

Mobility Thin and Small Form-Factor Packaging for Intel® Processors Based on Original 45nm Intel Core™ Microarchitecture

PACKAGE DESIGN TEAM'S CHALLENGES

The mobility package design team for the Penryn family of processors included only four team members: a design engineer, a requirement engineer, a platform power-delivery engineer, and a layout designer. This extremely small team faced the additional challenge of being geographically dispersed. Initially, team coordination was extremely challenging, especially since the dispersal of team members spanned multiple continents with all the inherent time differences. After aligning the work flow, this setup actually worked to the team's advantage and enabled the team to meet and beat multiple package design deliverables. For example, at the beginning of the typical cycle, team members located in the U.S. did what-if changes and analysis to the package design database. At the end of the U.S. workday, designers passed on the preliminary design database to the package layout team member in Malaysia. The Malaysian team member performed layout design rule cleanup and production-worthy implementation of changes and then, at the end of the Malaysia work day, passed on the design to the team member located in India. The Indian team member completed power-delivery network extraction, did the simulations from layout, and identified any processor performance impacts. In the event that processor IO FSB performance might be impacted, simulation models for stakeholders located in Israel were generated. Israeli stakeholders used layout-modeled data for FSB performance impact analysis, identified issues, and recommended solutions during their working hours. By the time US team members came back to work on their next business day, the team had already completed the extraction, simulation, and analysis of “yesterday's” work, thereby compressing the four-day wait time of co-located design teams into one twenty-four-hour work cycle. This work model was perfected and used by the package design team throughout multiple Penryn mobility processor package design flavors. It enabled the team to design more than seven mobility packages with less than typical staffing, and in one case, finished four weeks earlier than the originally agreed-upon package tapeout schedule.

  Section 6 of 10  

Back to Top