Advanced system design concepts facilitating silicon based VLSI chip packaging and interconnection techniques

Potentially, the silicon-based VLSI chip packaging and interconnection technology (hybrid wafer-scale integration, HWSI) provides for several thousand high-speed interconnections between individual VLSI chips, allowing an electrically homogeneous chip-boundary-transparent clustering of a tremendous amount of digital circuitry. Therefore, the abstract-structured logic-design methodology can also be efficiently used for more complex system structures, such as an entire central electronic complex of a supermini-computer, which may comprise a multitude of VLSI chips executing heterogeneous system functions. A brief introduction to an abstract-structured digital design utilizing increased intercommunication resources between functional logic modules is given, along with a description of several potential realization concepts of the silicon-based VLSI chip-interconnection technology, which provides an extraordinarily high pin count. In addition, the key aspects of the technology are outlined, and their potential use in system-level design is illustrated by several intercommunication-intensive implementation examples.<>